TED-1
A better way to talk about love
OK, so today I want to talk about how we talk about love. And specifically, I want to talk about what’s wrong with how we talk about love.
Most of us will probably fall in lave a few times over the course of our lives, and in the English language, this metaphor, falling, is really the main way that we talk about that experience. I don’t know about you, but when I conceptualize this metaphor, what I picture is straight out of a cartoon – like there’s a man, he’s walking down the sidewalk, without realizing it, he crosses over an open manhole, and he just plummets into the sewer below. And I picture it this way because falling is not jumping. Falling is accidental, it’s uncontrollable. It’s something that happens to us without our consent. And this – this is the main way we talk about starting a new relationship.
metaphor: 比喻
conceptualize: 概念化，想象
manhole: 井
plummets into: 垂直降落
sewer: 下水道
consent: 同意
I am a writer and I’m also an English teacher, which means I think about words for living. You could say that I get paid to argue that the language we use matters, and I would like to argue that many of the metaphors we use to talk about love – maybe even most of them – are a problem.
argue: 论证，表明
So in love, we fall. We’re struck. We are crushed. We swoon. We burn with passion. Love makes us crazy, and it makes us sick. Our hearts ache, and then they break. So our metaphors equate the experience of loving someone to extreme violence or illness.
struck: 打击，震惊
crushed: 碎，压碎
swoon: 昏昏欲睡
passion: 爱情
ache: 疼痛
equate … to …: 把…等同于…
extreme: 极端的
violence: 暴力
They do. And they position us as the victims of unforeseen and totally unavoidable circumstances. My favorite one of these is “smitten”, which is the past participle of the word “smite”. And if you look this word up in the dictionary – you will see that it can be defined as both “grievous affliction”, and to be “very much in love”. So I tend to associate the word “smite” with a very particular context, which is the Old Testament. In the Book of Exodus alone, there are 16 references to smiting, which is the word that Bible uses for the vengeance of an angry God.
unforeseen: 意外
unavoidable: 不可避免的
circumstances: 情况
smitten:
participle: 分词
grievous affliction: 严重的痛苦
the Old Testament: 《旧约》
the Book of Exodus: 《出埃及记》
Bible: 圣经
vengeance: 复仇
Here we are using the same word to talk about love that we use to explain a plague of locusts. Right? So, how did this happen? How have we come to associate love with great pain and suffering? And why do we talk about this ostensibly good experience as if we are victims? These are difficult questions, but I have some theories. And to think this through, I want to focus on one metaphor in particular, which is the idea of love is madness.
plague: 疫，鼠疫
locusts: 蝗虫
ostensibly: 表面上地
madness: 疯狂