Expository Text

Language of Love

Language is often slow to keep up with changes in society. This shows in the language we use to describe the person we romantically love. Keith Harvey reports.

Love is what makes the world go round, or at least that’s what they say…If you love someone but you’re not married, how do you refer to that person? Do you fell comfortable describing someone as your “lover”, for example? A recent BBC English programme asked a group of English speakers to give their opinion on using the word “lover” to describing the person they love:

“Lover”, um, it just sounds too sexual. It just refers to what I do in bed!”

“It just implies a fling, I think.”

“The word ‘lover’ you wouldn’t tend to use in conversations to your friends.”

“I don’t have a lover.”

“I don’t know it sort of implies, maybe you’re not living together, or maybe you’re somebody’s mistress.”

“It makes me blush a bit, actually, if people say ‘lover’. I always think, I don’t think I really want to know that.”

Those people weren’t happy about using the word “lover” to describe someone they’re having a relationship with. One of them even found the word embarrassing.

But if you’re not married and having a relationship with someone, what word do you use to describe them?

Girlfriend, boyfriend?

You may think that those words are too adolescent, too young for adult relationships. So maybe you just call them your “friend” or “other half” or even a whole phrase like “the person I’m seeing at the moment”. Or do you prefer more modern description “partner”?

“Well,. I usually say ‘may partner’, not because I think it’s a particularly good thing to say, but just because I think it’s a particularly good thing to say, but just because I think all the other ones are a bit inadequate.”

“If it was someone I didn’t know very well, I might say “girlfriend”.

“I think I’m a bit too old really to have a ‘boyfriend’ now. It sounds a bit teenage.”

“I’ve been hearing like the ‘other half’, is another one coming about, but then that implies that you’re not a whole.”

“I’d call him my ‘boyfriend’.”

“I’d just say ‘Hello, this is Kathy’.”

“It would depend who I was talking to probably a ‘partner’.”

:”I have a friend who’s, you know, a real feminist, and she prefers the word ‘partner’, and is actually offended if I use the term ‘boyfriend’.”

So each of those words “partner”, “boyfriend”, “girlfriend” may be used. Yet, as we’ve heard, none of them is accepted by everybody. The words are either too formal or informal, not clear enough or too explicit. What about the word “relationship”?

Leonard Michaels of the University of Berkeley in California explained why he didn’t like it:

“The word is abstract, technical, cold. It suggest a distance between people when it’s used to describe, especially, a romantic connection. It has a formality about it. It suggests that your connection to another person is in some important way limited, perhaps temporary. Also, it has tended of late to replace a lot of other words that are much nicer than ‘relationship’: words like boyfriend, ‘girlfriend’, lover, ‘beau’, “’or “sweetheart”, “steady date” so on and so forth and it suggests a more temporary connection than “steady late”.

So if you’re not married, finding the right word to describe that special person in your life is not easy. Although laws in Britain about people living together without being married have changed, language is slow to keep up with these developments. The more words we have to refer to the unmarried lover, the more we realize that language reflects the different attitudes that still exist in society.