It's official!

[bnewman]

fiddledragon and I are very good friends.

In and of itself, that's not really a new development — so why are we both so ecstatically happy about it?

I, for one, have been wrestling with questions about what makes a relationship a Relationship since the end of my Relationship with Rachel, and had been genuinely worried about the fact that, the next time I got to practice my relationship-negotiating skills, it would be (as usual) without a net.

Relatedly, I was concerned that any situation in which I could learn that someone had a deep affection for me would also be a without-a-net situation, which I would avoid, and thus never find out, despair, despair! Only, not actually despair, because I have plenty of other stuff going on that is keeping me quite busy and basically happy, but you get the idea.

So, I love linguists, and here is why: it is so much easier to have that conversation when you can say:

• "The truth-functional lexical semantics of 'love' is underspecified," or
• "I think the problem is that there's no vernacular lexical item for the kind of relationship we're talking about,"

and know that the other person will simply understand what you mean and not read any self-important subtext into your use of big, technical words.

Anyway, since the truth-functional lexical semantics of "love" is underspecified (i.e. it is polysemic), I looked it up; www.answers.com says:

1. A deep, tender, ineffable feeling of affection and solicitude toward a person, such as that arising from kinship, recognition of attractive qualities, or a sense of underlying oneness.
2. A feeling of intense desire and attraction toward a person with whom one is disposed to make a pair; the emotion of sex and romance.

This allows me to announce with confidence: fiddledragon and I are in love¹, and it is truly a wonderful thing.

Comments

[sammka.livejournal.com]

AWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!

I know what you're talking about and it's wonderful! Yay!