[Hardy-l] Tess' freedom

[Keith Wilson]

Surely there is a fairly major logical problem with this claim.  Any imbalance in the quantity of words available to describe loving and killing is related not to our greater propensity to kill but to a difference in the nature of the phenomena being described.  We have many words for killing because it's an unequivocally physical act and there are many ways of doing it:  so "evisceration" on the one hand or "garrotting" on the other indicate very different, if equally unpleasant, acts.
 
Loving -- when it's not merely a euphemism for a physical act (and we certainly have a rich variety of words for when it is merely a physical act, most of which I'd rather not print here) -- is an emotional state, much more elusive of definition, and therefore (as virtually any poet or novelist has discovered) usually requiring far more than single words if the attempt is to be made.  But surely even within that elusiveness of definition, we have all sorts of words that signify different kinds and degrees of that emotional condition: "affection," "devotion," "fondness," "desire", "passion", "yearning" etc.  Admittedly they can't all be reduced to a simply synonymous relationship with "love," but then nor can "execution" be reduced to a simply synonymous relationship with "killing".
 
The more relevant contrastive term with "love" (given this distinction between emotional inclinations and physical acts) would be "hate" -- i.e. the emotional state rather than a physical act it might lead to.  We don't have more words for "hate" than we do for "love."
 
In short, it's neither true that we have only one word for love, nor that "love" is a logical/fit contrastive term with "kill".
 
Best,
 
Keith  
 
> this still doesn't
explain the dozens of words we have for killing and only one for love.

Rosemarie
>How about erotic love, brotherly love, and agape love? // glish is
>mainly an analytic language and generally avoids stringing morphemes
>together into compound words.
>Chuck Anesi



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