I got to thinking about words and how we use them, nowadays. Why would I be thinking about this? Well, I am Wiwohka the Woodsy Wordpecker… am I not?!

Anyway, I got to thinking about the word “Love”, from how we define it, to how we often employ its use. I decided to stay away from the “why” part of this, as it is a slippery slope… at best!

I went onto Google in search of the word’s definition, and it’s ridiculous how much fodder keeps being added into many of our dictionaries, these days.

Most of what I found were different examples of love, in sentence form. I ended up staying with Oxford’s actual breakdown.

The Oxford definition for the noun portion of the words meaning, is this: an intense feeling of deep affection.

The verb meaning is: to feel deep affection for (someone).

I’m not kidding, people, this is the first line for both forms of the words meaning, out of the Oxford Dictionary! The only difference is the word feel, which is supposed to satisfy us as an action… that’s it!

Ok, well then… let’s look up the word affection, which is in both descriptions.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, affection is defined as this:

a feeling of liking for a person or place: She felt no affection for the child. He had a deep affection for his aunt.

Again with that “feel” word!

There sure does seem to be a whole lot of emotions running around, but not much action to accompany them, as I’m sure you’ve already noticed.

Let’s try a different tack! What about the definition of friend, which is often associated with the word love.

Again, Oxford describes the word Friend as both a noun and a verb, just like it did for the word love.

The noun portion is this:

“a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.”

Here we go, right back to the word affection.

The verb form of friend:

“add (someone) to a list of contacts associated with a social networking website. “I am friended by 29 people who I have not friended back”

Really?! I’m not even making this stuff up!

I have come to believe that if we leave LOVE in the hands of scholars and media platform buttons, we are doomed!

In all of my crazy brain writing this morning, you might be asking yourselves “what’s love got to do with any of this?”

In my dictionary battles, I can clearly see Love being minimalized into nothing more than a feeling… how sad!

It seems that when we enact the verbal form of Love, first, we discover that the noun form of the word has become so so so much more than just feelings!

If it weren’t, the outcome of the world’s future would be quite unthinkable… in my opinion, that is.