Whoever wrote “The Book of Love” neglected to include the handy emoticon <3, which looks like a heart if you turn your head sideways. Grant and Martha talk about how that bit of affectionate shorthand can function as a verb, and about the antiquated words for “kiss,” osculate and exosculate. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Kiss Emoticon”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
Ever since Milton Glaser put a big red heart in the famous I love New York motto instead of the word love, lots of people have made the joke that it’s really I heart New York.
You can do it with all kinds of knockoffs too, like I heart my labradoodle bumper stickers.
You’ve seen those, Martha?
Yeah, yeah.
And people say that, right? I heart my Doberman.
Right.
I heart my honor student.
Right, or I spayed my Doberman.
There we go. I’ve seen that as well.
And you can even be in heart with someone as a result, which is one of those things that’s on one hand kind of horrific.
Is there a knife involved to be in heart with somebody? I don’t know.
And it’s kind of charming as well.
Well, in certain kinds of casual typing, a heart is made by a less than sign and the number three.
If you look at it sideways, it looks like a heart, right?
Right.
So naturally, of course, now you can.
And people do bring that love to the silly side by saying things like, I less than three you, my schmoopsy poo.
I less than three you.
Yeah, yeah.
Or they say, will you ever bracket three me again, darling?
Because some people pronounce those as brackets instead of a less than sign.
And so it’s interesting that human craziness knows no bounds.
Oh, my gosh.
Well, we knew that.
So that’s your new word of the week.
I love that.
I mean, I less than three that.
That’s great.
Well, I was going to bring up an old word, which actually there’s several old words in Latin that meant to kiss.
The Romans had several different words.
One of my favorites, though, is oscula, which is a kind of friendly kiss.
And from that, we get the English word that we almost never hear, but maybe we should try to popularize, osculate, which means to kiss.
Very nice.
And that reminds me of another word, exosculate, which is to kiss heartily.
Oh, it’s not to kiss your ex?
No, no, no.
And I learned that word from the forgotten English word of the day calendar.
I flipped forward to my birthday to see what the word of the day was.
And wouldn’t you know it, on my birthday, it’s exosculate, kiss heartily.
You’re kidding.
So pucker up on my birthday.
I think I like snog better, though.
Well, if you have a favorite word that you’d like to talk about or a question about language, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.
We’d love to hear from you.
And the email address is words@waywordradio.org.
