Lost for words

What has the English speaking world been doing all of these years? Poets have been dilly-dallying around; writers have been lazy; lyricists have been procrastinating; colloquialism hasn’t even produced a satisfying result. I am speaking, of course, about the blurred the middle ground between 'like' and 'love'.

As a regular visitor to these lands, I have often found myself lost for words when it comes to explain to others (or myself) my feelings regarding certain females. As a man, I am therefore subject to the rules of male friendship – one of which is the immediate sound of derisive laughter that erupts around the pub table whenever the ‘L’ word is mentioned. Sometimes it's acceptable (if you happened to be married or extremely drunk) – but in general the word is to be avoided at all costs when adopting your public persona.

When you're alone, and happen to be in a particularly insular and self-reflective mood, you may well be inclined to think ‘to hell with bitter cynicism! I'm in love’; but the James Bond wannabe inside you inevitably takes the place of your friends; and you're still left with that niggling feeling that someone's laughing at you – even if it only yourself. After all, who actually enjoyed watching Bond fall in love in 'On Her Majesty's Secret Service'? No one that's who.

So, you are left with the word ‘like’; an extremely unromantic word, and one that seems best left to the school playgrounds and under 18 disco nights. So, ‘like’, too, is off the menu.

The problem with the word 'love' is that we have attributed too much sentimentality to it. After all, if we are to be cynical and scientific on the matter, the chocolate high of love is simply an abundance of certain chemicals inducing the unpleasant and confused state we all seem to lust after. A woman that I don't know well at all may trigger all of this in me; but I do not, in society’s perception, actually ‘love her’.

Yet this is the word that will spring to mind when attempting to explain to cynical friends my feelings for her. I will cringe as I feel the word forming on my tongue; I will apologise immediately after its usage; and then I will attempt to justify myself by blaming the English language. How is it possible that after all these years – with perhaps every single person experiencing these feelings – no word has been spawned that can sit comfortably between ‘like’ and ‘love’?

The reason, I think, is because we all love an excuse. When we are ‘in love’ we are excused to act, let it be said, like a bit of a prat. In the case of unrequited love, we allow ourselves to adopt a ‘Woe is me’ attitude, and we justify it by believing that we're in love. After all, 'love', with all its connotations, is a powerful thing – one that we've supposedly no control over. We simply let it wash over us in all its glory; excused for our petulance; excused for our misery; we aquire the sympathy of the world – because, hey, it's not our fault, we're 'in love'.

When we consider that it's simply chemicals being released, we see that this sulky behaviour is on a par with the child in the supermarket who has a tantrum because his mother refused to buy him the chocolate he wanted. But as adults, we don’t wish to view our behaviour in such a basic way, so we concocted a brilliant excuse for our childish antics: the romanticised view of love. It strikes me as scarily Orwellian that because a word for a middle-ground doesn't exist, we don't consider ourselves to be able to feel the middle-ground – we must be at either extreme. Not unlike in Newspeak, where the eradication of words was aimed at the eradication of the behaviour or beliefs the words represented, we have ignored the possibilities of a less romantic middle-ground in favour of poetic alternative. After all, it has to be said, that the Roman poet Catallus would not have had the same effect if he had written:

I hate and I like quite a lot,
Why do I do this you may ask,
I do not know
but I feel that it is done
And I'm slightly annoyed about the whole thing

rather than

I hate and I love
Why do I do this you may ask
I do not know
But I feel that it is done
And I am tortured

Good for poetry, then, but not so good, I'm sure you'll agree, for the people in the pub. A linguistic revolution is needed! Or, at the very least, a new word. How about 'schmogum'? 'I schmogum him/her'. Hmmm.