Thursday Thought: Love · 10:58pm Jun 11th, 2015
(Folks say that if you blog, you should blog predictably. I'm gonna try to blog every Thursday evening.)
They say the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow. Or they used to; it’s become a bitter debate among linguists, made worse by the fact that you can’t call people Eskimos anymore.
But anyway, those northern Native Americans distinguish many types of snow. If you’re going to walk five miles across ice fields to hunt seals when it’s fifty degrees below, it matters what kind of snow it is.
But 50 terms for snow would hardly be excessive. thesaurus.com lists 52 synonyms for the adjective angry in English. And 53 synonyms for the verb hit.
It lists only 18 synonyms for the verb love. I’ve used thesaurus.com for years, and that’s the fewest synonyms I remember seeing for any word.
If love is important to us, why have we got so few words for it? Even the “synonyms” we have are no good; the top of the list is admire, cherish, choose, and go for.
We haven’t got a word to distinguish romantic love from motherly love or brotherly love. We haven’t got a verb for ‘lust’ or ‘friendship’ that takes a direct object. We have a shocking paucity of words for love. So few that ‘love’ is barely a word. It's used in so many ways that it hardly means anything at all.
If the Eskimo Inuit, Yupik, and various other tribes have many words for snow because it’s important, does that mean love is unimportant to us?
No; just the opposite: We have only one word for love because it’s so important that it’s dangerous.
When you talk about snow, you want people to know precisely what kind of snow you’re talking about. When you talk about love, you want people not to know what you’re talking about.
Imagine you’re a man, and your girlfriend or wife asks you, “Do you love me?” You are, as stipulated, a man, so odds are your greatest act of introspection into your feelings was two years ago when you finally decided to switch from Busch to Yuengling. How strong does liking have to be, to be love? "Do you love me more than you love the Steelers?" Let’s be honest: there are many women in your state, and only one pro football team. It’s not a fair comparison.
Now imagine there are 50 words for 50 different types of love, and each night, she asks you about a different one of them.
Awkward.
If we named as many varieties of love as we’ve named ways of moving slowly, I suspect the word for the predominant romantic emotion that most women feel when they say “love” would be one that most men have never felt. And wouldn’t that make for some interesting late-night conversations?
But that’s not an explanation. If there’s an international male conspiracy to obliterate synonyms for ‘love’, I wasn’t told about it.
(Though that’s just what I would say, isn’t it?)
I think ‘love’ is like ‘God’ with a capital ‘G’. When there were many gods, people ascribed different qualities to each. But after Plato said ‘god’ had a single abstract essence, and Jesus said that essence was perfection, every good thing became part of God’s definition. (Hence some philosophers believed God must be a perfect sphere.)
So every good and positive human emotion got sucked into the word ‘love’. Still, that doesn’t explain why any more-specific terms disappeared. And it’s still suspiciously convenient.
Perhaps one of the causes of this problem is that discussions of love are frequently nonverbal.
Time to create words...
If memory serves, Inuktitut and related languages are members of the polysynthetic language group, characterized by forming sentencelike 'words' that carry very complex meanings. So they do have a preposterous number of words for snow, but only because they can make ones whenever the need strikes.
But still. Point taken. I just wanted to nitpick.
My own native language, incidentally, doesn't even differentiate between 'like' and 'love,' so you'd use the exact same word to describe your relationship with the love of your life and, say, pizza. We do have a word for 'to fall in love with' which, given the way morphology works in REDACTED, means we have a whole mess of adjectives, adverbs, &c, which helps a bit.
I think you have a point and would perhaps suggest that emotionally charged words have fewer shades of meaning in language precisely because their emotional charge makes it difficult to discriminate. If we differentiate between fifty types of snow we can agree with, oooh, a few dozen conferences and a couple of really good wrangles on the exact type of 'crunchiness' that differentiates Type XLVIII from Type XLIX. But something like love...
...bit like God, really. Even those who can agree such a thing exists can barely agree on anything more than that such a thing exists.
Also, because it is amazingly appropriate to the proceedings, a long-ago bit of scribble I wrote:
Clearly the solution is to sample people's cerebrospinal fluid in various forms of love and determine how many words we need for it with science.
3140541 We should begin by using ponies as verbs:
"I
you!" -- I'm fascinated by the things you do, and would like to understand you better.
"I
you!" -- I think you're pretty awesome!
"I
you!" -- I think you're fabulous!
"I
you!" -- We could have so much fun together!
"I
you!" -- I think you would make an acceptable henchman!
3140571 I
that idea!
3140580
you!" -- You're reliable, reasonable, and the sanest person in any room. Usually.
"I
"I
you!" -- You are my rock. (Also works for Maud Pie.)
"I
you!" -- I love you for who you are: an adorable force of destruction.
That last one may be kind of niche...
3140598
Nah, any parent of a little kid knows that one.
Are Emotions Natural Kinds? (Probably not.) There is no objective matter as to whether two different different affects are both love....
I'm envisioning a new trend, something of a follow-up to the whole "Historical Jesus" fad. Let's call it theological mechanics.
S: "But professor, if God is omnipotent, does that mean He can create a rock so heavy He can't lift it?"
P: "What a fascinating question! For millenia, we have struggled with that very idea—but now, we've found new ways to answer it. Consider a spherical god in a vacuum..."
3140686 That would be a spherical god of uniform density in a vacuum....
This is why God invented Adjectives and Adverbs.
3140729
To paraphrase Galileo:
No reasoning individual should feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with gerunds, participles, and catenative verbs intended to abridge our using of them.
"Four things greater than all things are:
Women and horses and power and war
And since we know not how war may prove,
Heart of my heart, let us talk of love."
--Rudyard Kipling
3140571
I can't tell whether you're Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory or Dexter from Darkly Dreaming Dexter.
ORLY?
Have they in fact?
Have you taken a survey of Middle- and Olde Anguische (to use Sellar And Yeatman's terminology)?
And if you did, would you include kennings?
Sure, maybe men are less romantic than woman, but to insinuate that none of us have ever felt romantic notions is a bit unrealistic, is it not?
3140556
This reminds me of something I was working on just after I discovered the fandom, but before I started writing ponyfic.
I called it The Work of Gods on Earth. Maybe I'll post parts of it someday.
"O God our Father, what is man, that thou art mindful of him? "
ANSWER UNCLEAR
TRY AGAIN LATER
It makes sense. Love is magnetism and nobody knows how magnets work.
3140861 I did not. I said "most women" and "most men", not "all women" or "all men".
3140832 It's just a theory! Which I just made up today.
Okay, actually thinking about the question.
I think the issue is that, while we do have general categories for "love," and I guess we could name those, that's not usually what we're talking about when we talk about love. Love is usually used to describe a feeling of relationship, which is expected to be unique between the individuals. Even the love of a mother for a child, well, anyone with multiple children will tell you it's different for each child.
Basically, only having one word for love encourages you to consider what this love is. Which is usually a combination of different categories (most people who fall into the romantic love category also feel friendship, etc.) combined with hints of other emotions. And naming this love is useless, because it wouldn't apply to any other love.
I think love is probably one of the few things where it's really valid to say that. There are enough moving parts in any relationship that no two of them will take the same shape.
This is why CS Lewis distinguished between "the four loves", I think, which is a useful take on the subject.
Somehow this doesn't surprise me, but I don't see it as a problem. Love is a massive term that gets overused, abused, and misinterpreted on a regular basis. Plenty of other words have at least some of those qualities counting against them at any given time. Each of the 50 types of snow could be gathered, measured, and quantified. The best we can do to measure love is in comparative… actually I'm going to stop. I'm not good at this. I'll sum up my sleep-addled thoughts in one word: umwelt
My comment adds nothing major to this discussion, but it was funny in my head.
Who in their right mind loves spheres that much, though?
"Because love is just a lazy generalisation that we use for a hundred feelings in as many situations."
More seriously; I think that "love", like "art", is one of those abstract terms that resists quantification and qualification, and is something that needs to be defined by the observer.
I believe that in many ways, "love" is subject to quantum mechanical effects, in particular the Observer Effect (in that by trying to examine love you effect the outcome) and the Uncertainty Principle (in that the more you determine about where love is, the harder it is to determine where it is going, and vice versa).
3140999 has a point. The Greeks had different words for love. Though I've only heard about the four, other places state they had six.
3141137
Not a fan of culling "art" down to "enlightens and entertains" then?
3141173
Nope.
By your definition, something that I decide is not enlightening and entertaining is not art; yet if someone else were to find the exact same thing enlightening and entertaining, it is art. Who is correct? Well, we *both* are (see the above mentioned Observer Effect and Uncertainty Principle).
I've seen plenty of things that do not "enlighten and/or entertain" me, yet I would still classify them as "art"; hence "art" (and "love") are abstract concepts where the definition has to be determined by each observer.
At least, that's my opinion. Yours may vary, and probably does.
3141189 I think pretending that an individual's opinions differing from another's is valid reason to abandon analysis is one of the most dangerous concepts ever set loose into public discussion.
If I hate a song, but someone else found its lyrics meaningful, then it has enlightened even though I have not been enlightened by it.
If only one person has ever looked upon a certain painting and smiled because it was visually pleasing, then it has entertained, even though we do not find it entertaining.
Anything which meets both criteria is art.
Do you disagree with any specific premise in this?
(Edit; I think you may be confusing the question of art as a category with art you approve of as a category. Your dissent seems to hinge on your opinion being part of the consideration, which is the exact opposite of the point. Unless you're a perfect sphere of uniform density, in which case we have some questions about rocks for you to answer first.)
3141285 I think that you may be missing my point - I'm not suggesting abandoning analysis because of differing individual opinions, I'm suggesting that analysis is near impossible because the subject is unquantifiable outside the experiences of each observer.
Yes - it's still too restrictive. Under my interpretation, something that meets *neither* criteria can still be considered Art.
Your definition of Art seems to be "that which enlightens and entertains". My definition of Art is "whatever the observer decides is Art".
I think this is where we are not reaching an understanding - under my interpretation, the opinion of the individual is not part of the consideration, it is the whole of the consideration. I can look at something and declare it to be Art. You can look at the same thing and declare it to be Not Art. We are both correct.
3141349
3141285
Interesting. My own definition of "art" is "things that were deliberately created to be art or in which the skill involved in creating them passes a certain threshold of impressiveness". Note these are separate definitions, the same way 'right' can mean 'correct or the opposite of left'.
'Deliberately created' is important and shared by both definitions though. Only religion allows one to perceive natural occurrences as art rather than as beautiful things comparable to art, because then they become deliberate.
An accidental splash of paint, no matter how beautiful it turns out is not art, simply pretty.
And whether or not it entertains or informs anyone sounds more like an measure of whether or not it is successful art, not whether or not it is art.
3140686 What is Divine Power? It is Divine Energy divided by Divine Time.
3141285
That's a great observation, regardless of whether or not The Ponytrician is doing that.
3141349
"that which enlightens and entertains" is problematic, but "whatever the observer decides is Art" is giving up. Even for things that are entirely subjective, like pleasure or pain, we don't say pain is whatever someone decides is pleasure. We have the word to name a category; we have the category so we can think; we can't think if the category is arbitrary and meaningless. The only categories X that can be usefully defined as "whatever each person thinks is X" are categories about a person's thoughts. Your beliefs or intentions might possibly be defined as "whatever you think are your beliefs" (or intentions), though I'd say even that's very misleading.
If someone has been raised from childhood to believe that pleasure is bad, and they react to everything pleasant with a shudder, and say it gives them pain, I don't say "oh, well, that's just what they perceive as pain." I say they're screwed up and they perceive pleasure as pain incorrectly.
3141415 "things that were deliberately created to be art or in which the skill involved in creating them passes a certain threshold of impressiveness".
When a beaver builds a dam, is that art? I ask seriously. It seems arbitrary to say only humans can create art. I think a bowerbird's nest is certainly art.
3143220
Depends on how impressive you think the beaver's skill level is, I suppose. The beaver probably wasn't trying to be artistic.
But, while I'm sure some might disagree, I'll accept things animals created if they tried to make them look a certain way to achieve an effect on other animals (definition 1) or it took a lot of skill (definition 2) as art. A bowerbird nest definitely qualifies. A beaver dam is a bit more debatable.
It can't just be 'anything that enlightens or entertains' because then it means pretty much everything is art at some point-- someone tripping on a banana peel (by accident, not as part of a comedy sketch) becomes art the minute it entertains an onlooker and that does not seem right. Now, someone deliberately taking a pratfall is different, of course.
3143214 I do wish I could hammer down the phrasing of it a little. Any suggestions? I think the meaning is clear as is, and that's the critical objective, but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
3143214
Can you think of something which could never, under any circumstances, be rightly thought of as art?
...Because if you can, you can probably make a name for yourself by renting some gallery space and displaying it. Though that would hurt your point a bit.
3143391
That's not how words work. Can you think of some object which could never, under any circumstances, be rightly used as a paperweight?
Words describe categories which we can use to reduce our uncertainty about the world. Introducing the qualification that a word is only valid if it applies to every possible thing you might wish were in the category is the same as saying that you should only say something if your probability of being wrong were zero, which is literally, theoretically impossible.
3143487
No, and that's my point. What defines a paperweight is its position on top of paper (and you can then argue if it's a good paperweight or not.) If you were using an item which is not a paperweight as a paperweight, it's now a paperweight. Even if someone else always thought of it as a rock or a shoe or the Lincoln Memorial.
So if someone is treating an item as art, or, as The Ponytrician put it, if someone decides that an item is art, it's now art. You can debate if it's good art or not, but the mere fact of someone using it in the context of art makes it art, according to the artistic community (and generally accepted by the public these days, along with the caveat that artists are kind of crazy like that.)
Edit: Don't blame me and The Ponytrician for this, blame Duchamp and Warhol.
3143520
I'd say that someone using it in the context of art is a claim that it's art, and modern artists have gotten into the habit of thinking that it is the claim itself which is an act of performance art, perhaps more important than the object itself.
However, we still need to have an idea what art is. I don't think defining art as "those things claimed to be art" is useful or interesting, and I don't expect discussions with people defining it that way to be fruitful, particularly in the production of better art.
Saying that something can be "good" art, which I think you believe, admits that there is some definition of art, for the definitions of "art" and "good art" are the same thing. "Bad art" is a bad exemplar of the category "art".
3143689
Fair enough. In that case my definition of art is indirect communication. Intention is not required. I don't expect everyone will agree with that, but I'd say that sums up how I judge art when someone puts it in front of me.
That being said, I still would never look at something someone showed me as art and say "that's not art." I might say "yeah, it doesn't do anything for me." I might even write at length about how it doesn't do anything for me. But I would never call something "not art," so as a word, when I use it, art is going to include anything someone shows me as art. And I would say that's true for most people in English speaking countries today, so that is what the word means.
I'm not sure why, but at the time I made the comment, I was under the impression that "art" would be easier to agree on than "love".
I must not have slept well the previous night or something. The very idea of writers agreeing about the nature of art sounds kinda laughable.
3143747
I think there are some cases where the intent is clear but a flaw in its execution could lead me to responding that it is a failed attempt at art, but not art.
Like a metal sculpture that fell apart because the sculptor isn't a very good welder. That's not art, it's scrap. If they fix it, it could be art. It might have been art, had the flaw never come to light. But any claim that the current state is still art is just laziness, or worse, defensiveness.
It's not that useful.
It's not that complex.
It's difficult to break down because most subclasses are too complex.
It's difficult to communicate subclasses because it's not consistent.
Subclasses can be accurately communicated with a small number of other simple words.
Instances of it aren't so common that they deserve their own word.
It's only ever described in flowery prose, inhibiting the creation of accurate single words.
People never forget the word when trying to describe it, inhibiting the creation of synonyms.
There's probably a better way to organize these.
Love is like a game of Calvinball.
The rules, the sides, and even the goals change constantly and without notice. The only thing you can say for sure is whether you are or are not playing.
Ah. I needed an excuse to post this.
As for the word love... damn, it's a strong word. It speaks of obligation.