flâneur

English doesn't have enough words for Love

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"Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars?" ― Milan Kundera, Slowness Sanskrit has 96 words for love. Greek has 8. English has only 1. I've been thinking about something anthropologist Robert Levy discovered in 1973- Tahitians didn’t have a word to describe grief. When they lost someone close to them, they’d say they felt ‘sick’ or ‘strange’. But they couldn’t conceptualize grieving. Or the Berlin-Kaye color sequence, and how the word for blue often comes very late in the development of a language, and how before it does, speakers of those languages would have only conceptualized different shades of green. And I think about how English seems to be a language starved of descriptions of love, and how maybe this might mean our culture might be starved of love. And how there might be shades of exper

Sanskrit has 96 words for love. Greek has 8. English has only 1. I've been thinking about something anthropologist Robert Levy discovered in 1973- Tahitians didn’t have a word to describe grief. When they lost someone close to them, they’d say they felt ‘sick’ or ‘strange’. But they couldn’t conceptualize grieving. Or the Berlin-Kaye color sequence, and how the word for blue often comes very late in the development of a language, and how before it does, speakers of those languages would have only conceptualized different shades of green. And I think about how English seems to be a…

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