The English Language
(The Highest Form Of Math)

Love

       Words, certainly including important words like love, do have meanings, and the integrity of their meanings matters.
    Playful trivializations, like declaring one's love for French fries don' t matter much, since they confuse nobody.
    Inflated oratorical blather, like thundering one's supposed love for God or America or honor, does matter, because it distorts philosophy.
    I think young girls and their girlfriends, people and their pets, and maybe lesbians and gays, honestly love each other in as special a way (though certainly in a different way) as do men and women. I don't know. Maybe.
    Politically correct affectations, however, like prissily declaring one's love for one's same-sex friends, besides being strenuously self-conscious, theatrical, certainly inaccurate, and embarrassing (if not slanderous) to one's straight friends, would be better avoided by simply and logically elevating the force of the word friendship.
    Some words may bear the weight of more than one perfectly legitimate homonymic or derivative but not really synonymic meaning without confusion (as lie and lie or funny and funny). But, the more important the word, the more important the limitations and distinctions.
    Love of persons may be romantic or filial or an antidote for loneliness - but I think that's about it. I have seriously, romantically, foolishly loved maybe a dozen women in my life, and I love my daughter. And, for me, that's all.
    The word is delicate, it's supposed to be uniquely special, and a two-dimensional meaning is all the stretching it will bear. My friends will have to settle for my friendship.

-Glen Roberts

p.s. the tennis non-score love, ironically meaning nothing, nada, zilch,zip, goose eggs, is a coincidental false cognate - a misspelling of the French phrase le oeuf (l' oeuf), pronounced somewhere between luh- uv and loo oove, which means the egg and therefore, in tennis, a game first played in France, the big fat zero.