The Crazy Cosmic Lurve God

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Martina.

Hello, Martina.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Yeah, what’s up?

All right, I bought a card for my husband, who is serving in the Navy in Iraq for a year.

And on the card, there were two guys.

It was kind of a 70s photograph.

The one guy on the lift looks like an office clerk with a brown polyester suit, massive sideburns.

And the other one on the right looks like a Gary Glitter-like psychedelic rock star with hairy chest and big hair.

And then the inscription read, by day, smart, sensible office clerk with suit.

By night, crazy cosmic love god with attitude.

And I just love the image, and I love the whole card because I sent it with a present of my husband’s favorite TV show, which is from England from the 70s.

And I wanted to kind of combine this, but I do not know the meaning of the word love.

It spells L-U-R-V-E.

And I’m not an English native speaker.

My first language is German.

So I always pick up my dictionaries, and I could not find it.

And then I asked some friends who were English native speakers, and they didn’t know it either.

So I thought maybe that’s a question for Grant and Martha.

Well, hello.

I think it is.

Well, what do you think it means?

Well, I thought maybe it’s an Austin Powers-like pronunciation of the word love, and I can’t even fake a British accent, but it’s kind of groovy.

Oh, please go ahead and try.

Love or something like that.

Nice, nice.

But I don’t know if that’s the case or not.

It’s something like that.

It’s certainly an exaggerated, dramatic pronunciation of love.

So you can just replace L-U-R-V-E with love and get the same idea, except there’s a little more happening there when you say love.

You know, it’s just like an exaggerated way, and it’s kind of a mooning, pining, angsty kind of love.

You know, it’s just really over.

It’s not love.

It’s love.

But what happens there is something interesting in the mouth, at least to English speakers.

It’s another case of what we call the intrusive R.

So when we stretch out that O sound and we kind of pucker our lips and kind of a kissy face, just do that.

Everyone do that with me now.

I want the entire country.

So just do this.

You go, love.

Yeah, you hear the R kind of show up, doesn’t it?

That’s right.

And so people, when they do this really dramatic kind of kissy face voicing of the word love, obviously the best way to spell that is L-U-R-V-E.

Okay.

You’ll find it a whole bunch of places online.

And they’re almost always humorous or ironic uses of love where it’s kind of teasing, joshing, jesting, joking kind of talk about love rather than something very serious and personal.

And certainly if you were giving your husband a card with a couple of characters out of the 1970s on it, like two different kind of clichés of the 70s man on it, then that’s exactly the right medium for love to show up.

Well done, well done.

All right, well, thank you for calling.

We appreciate the question.

Thank you so much, you guys.

That was really awesome.

We loved talking to you, didn’t we, Grant?

Yes, we did.

Thank you, my team.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Grant, is that the same idea as, I know we’ve talked before about the word nasty.

That’s really nasty instead of nasty.

Is that the same idea, that intrusive R?

It’s a little bit like that, yeah.

There are some variations here.

And there’s a jargony word that we can kind of throw in here.

Oh, good.

You sure?

Yes.

It’s a type of apenthesis.

Oh, of course, apenthesis.

Appenthesis is when a sound inserts itself into a word for no reason really whatsoever that has to do with etymology or the true history or original spelling of the word.

Appenthesis.

E-P-N-T-H-E-S-E-S.

Appenthesis.

Okay.

All right.

Well, super duper.

If you’ve got a question like Martina’s, we’d love to help you with it.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.