In his 1869 volume Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, self-appointed grammar maven Richard Meade Bache gave specious advice against using the word love when you merely mean like. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Love or Like?”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. I promised more examples of pet peeves of people from the 19th century that eventually became things that are perfectly acceptable in English. And this one is from a book called Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech from 1869. And it’s talking about the use of love instead of like, the use of the word love when you actually just like something. And this writer says, although the word love may be applied to many things less exalted than those capable of inspiring the passion of love, there are limits. If persons really mean what they say, when they speak of loving oysters, cake, ice cream, et cetera, it is confessing a deplorable circumstance, which they would do better to keep to themselves.
Yeah, right. Sure. A deplorable circumstance. My question for you is when these guys, and it’s almost always old white dudes from the Northeast, when they made these pronouncements, they weren’t actually wrong. I mean, those pronouncements were wrong even for the time, right? They were not in accord with common usage at the time in any case.
Yeah, yeah. And there were women, too, who wrote these books.
Right. But it’s not—I just wanted to go back to what you said at the top, though. It’s not that it’s become correct. It’s that it’s always been correct. That somehow they took a detour and took it upon themselves to perfect an English they saw as broken.
Yes, exactly. Let me give you another example of another writer talking about love. A man loves his children, his mother, his wife, his mistress, the truth, his country. But some men speak of loving green peas or apple pie, meaning they have a liking for them. I mean, this is just hair splitting, right?
Right, it’s totally hair splitting. It’s just somebody who, yeah, I don’t know. I’m just waiting for him to go in. And teenagers today, because it sounds very much like the kind of peeve against the young people that you hear today.
Let me give you one more example, then. Here’s another one on that same topic. Still less say of anything which you enjoy at table. I love it. I love melons. I love peaches. I adore grapes. These are schoolgirl utterances. We love our friends. Love is an emotion of the heart, but not of the palate.
There we go. This is what we see time and time again, that there’s classism, elitism, racism, and other isms wrapped up in this notion of correct English. And really, I don’t even know if they realize that they’re manifesting their own prejudices in this way.
I don’t really know.
Yeah. It’s pretty funny reading, actually. Sexism was the other ism, right? Lots of isms. Gender-specific complaint about the speech of other people is sexism.
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