915. Love is much more than romance, and different languages reveal universal truths about the different kinds of love. Plus, we look at whether you should write about wool sweaters or woolen sweaters, silk blouses or silken blouses, wood benches or wooden benches. Is it actually OK to use nouns as adjectives?
913. Love is much more than romance, and different languages reveal universal truths about the different kinds of love. Plus, we look at whether you should write about wool sweaters or woolen sweaters, silk blouses or silken blouses, wood benches or wooden benches. Is it actually OK to use nouns as adjectives?
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we’re going to talk about 14 words for love, and whether you should say you’re wearing a wool sweater or a woolen sweater.
Valentine’s Day makes you think of love, of course, but what is love, really? It’s not just one thing. But in English, we love our parents, our children, our romantic partners, and our friends all in different ways. We “love” skiing or cooking or reading. We “love” our favorite author who we don’t even actually know. We “love” a good challenge. We make that word work hard!
Well, different languages have different words for different kinds of love, and fortunately for us, the psychologist Tim Lomas from the University of East London has studied and collected them!
Lomas has written multiple books about words and happiness. His most recent is “Happiness Found in Translation: A Glossary of Joy from Around the World,”
Two examples are “bazodee”: a Creole word (from Trinidad and Tobago) to describe a dizzy and dazed happiness, a bewildered, discombobulated joy, and “charmolypi”: a Greek word for the sad, joy-making sorrow when happiness and sadness intermingle.’”
But what really drew me to his work was a 2018 post on The Conversation about 14 different kinds of love that come from what he calls “untranslatable” words from other languages. He looked at words from around 50 languages — he says Greek had the most words for “love” — and then categorized them into what he calls “flavors.” As with cooking, you can blend different flavors. You may feel a few different kinds of love for your spouse, for example.
These flavors are compilations of words from different languages. For example, one flavor is love for places. He found words in Maori, Welsh, and Spanish that in some way described a feeling of love for a place, “a place to stand on this Earth, somewhere secure that we can call home.” Since I’m learning Spanish, I paid special attention to the Spanish word he highlighted in this class of love: “querencia.” It seems to roughly translate to “haunt,” the way we’d use it in English in “That’s his favorite haunt,” a location you return to over and over.
Ernest Hemingway used “querencia” in a scene about bullfighting in “Death in the Afternoon” writing, “A ‘querencia’ is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring, a preferred locality...It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not usually show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his ‘querencia’ he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill.”
So that’s our first flavor of love: love of place. Lomas next found words for love of activities and love of objects.
Next, we get to people (finally!), and languages show three big categories of words for the non-romantic love we feel. Love for our family, love for our friends, and love for ourselves. This is all love filled with affection and loyalty.
And for romance, he adds words for the feelings of passionate desire and star-crossed destiny. For example, the Japanese words “koi no yokan” mean something like a “premonition of love” — Lomas says, “capturing the feeling on first meeting someone that falling in love will be inevitable.” And Chinese has a word “yuán fèn” that he says can be interpreted as “a binding force of irresistible destiny.”
And finally, he says “there are three forms of selfless, ‘transcendent’ love.” “Agape” in Greek, for example, is one word for selfless compassion. “Koinonia” in Greek literally translates to “society,” but according to Lomas can describe being “emotionally swept up within a group dynamic,” and finally “sebomai,” again in Greek, translates to mean to revere, respect, or worship and leads to the idea of the kind of love a believer feels for god.
And I have to add, I feel like he missed one: love for a pet. I’m sure some people would say that falls under love for family, but I loved my dog in a way that I just don’t feel is captured in any of these descriptions. So let’s make it at least 15 different kinds of love.
So this Valentine’s Day, think beyond the limited idea of romance. Love is so much more.
Again, that segment was based on the work of Tim Lomas. Check out his book, Happiness Found in Translation: A Glossary of Joy from Around the World.”
by Mignon Fogarty
Every once in a while, I get questions about word pairs such as “wood” and “wooden” or “wool” and “woolen.” Sometimes it’s a commenter insisting that you can’t wear a wool sweater—that you can only wear a woolen sweater—and sometimes it’s just someone wondering whether he should write about a wood bench or a wooden bench.
One reason for the confusion is that although we have adjectives in English, we can also use nouns as adjectives. And when we do, they’re called attributive nouns.
Some nouns often act like adjectives, some only do it sometimes, and others rarely or never act like adjectives. To make matters even more confusing, some words are both nouns and full adjectives.
To think about attributive nouns, let’s consider this sentence, which has three nouns acting like adjectives:
I decorated the wood tables with cotton tablecloths, and everyone loved my patio setup.
We could substitute a word that is only an adjective in place of all those nouns: I could write something like “I decorated the old tables with pretty tablecloths, and everyone loved my cute setup.” The adjectives “old,” “pretty,” and “cute” replaced all those nouns that were acting like adjectives. The sentence doesn’t mean exactly the same thing, but it’s still grammatically correct.
A while ago, I came across an article by Philip Gove, the editor of Webster’s Third dictionary, in which he talks about nothing but how they struggled with labeling nouns that act this way. They were the first dictionary to use the label “often attributive” for some nouns, and they put a lot of thought into which nouns deserved this label.
The three nouns in my example sentences are all labeled differently in Webster’s Third. “Cotton” is used as an adjective often enough that it gets the label “often attributive.” “Patio” is used this way rarely enough that it doesn’t get a special label. It’s just a noun, even though we can use it attributively if we want. “Wood” had been used as an adjective for so long that it’s considered a full-blown standard adjective in its own right.
Not all nouns have related adjectives. “Cotton” and “fleece,” for example, are your only choices for describing a cotton shirt and fleece jacket. But when there is a related adjective you get to choose. For example, since “wool,” and “silk” have the adjective forms “woolen” and “silken,” you get to choose between the attributive noun and the adjective. You can wear a silken scarf with your woolen sweater, or you can wear a silk scarf with your wool sweater. Both ways of saying it are correct. You can also mix and match, saying you wore a silk scarf with your woolen sweater, but I think it often sounds better to stick with the same form within one sentence.
Google Ngram searches can show you when writers and editors tend to choose the attributive noun or the adjective. For example, writers don’t seem to care whether their scarves are wool or woolen. The phrase “wool scarf” is a little more common, but it’s not dramatic. On the other hand, it appears almost nobody ever writes “woolen blazer.” “Wool blazer” is vastly more common. “Wool sweater” has, for the most part, become increasingly popular relative to “woolen sweater” since the 1970s, and the same holds true for “wool socks” over “woolen socks.” As you can see, it’s more about what sounds right to you than any logical choice of whether “wool” or “woolen” is right or wrong.
Sometimes though, using the attributive noun or the adjective can cause ambiguity. Both “silk” and “wood” are nouns, full adjectives, and have the adjective forms “silken” and “wooden.” Sometimes “silken” or “wooden” is the best choice, and sometimes “silk” or “wood” is the best choice.
For example, if I talk about a silken blouse, I could mean a blouse that is made of silk or a blouse that just feels like silk. In that case, if it’s really made of silk, it is better to call it a silk blouse.
On the other hand, if I’m talking about a bench made from wood, it’s better to use the longer adjective form “wooden” and call it a wooden bench. If I called it a wood bench, you might think it is a bench for woodworking.
So as you can see, with nouns, attributive nouns, and adjectives, the choice is up to you (and there’s nothing wrong with the phrase “wool sweater”), but you do have to consider your words on a case-by-case basis and make sure your meaning is clear.
As a final aside, I also thought it was fascinating to consider nouns that are never used attributively. A few that Gove mentioned were “abyss,” “accomplice,” and “abdomen.”
Finally, I have a familect story.
"Hello, Grammar Girl. I have followed you for years. You have been entertaining and helpful and educational and more. I wanted to share a word which I am certain is unique to my family. When I was growing up, we will go to my grandparents house, and my grandmother, I don't think she had teeth, and she would take her Graham crackers and soak them in the milk, and she would eat them, and she would always give us a plank or half a plank, and we didn't have those snacks at my house. My parents were really health conscious. so we thought we got cookies. So I thought those were called grandma crackers because we only had them at my grandmother's house. So for years that’s we called those: grandma crackers instead of Graham crackers. Thank you. I look forward to more of your podcasts. Bye-bye.
Thanks for the call. That’s a great story. And now for the credits, I have something a little different.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a family dialect or a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL, and we might play it on the show.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to our audio engineer Nathan Semes, and our editor, Adam Cecil. Our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin, our digital operations specialist is Holly Hutchings, who would like to learn to garden so she can be more self-reliant. Our ad operations specialist is Morgan Christianson, and our intern is Kamryn Lacy. And I’m Quantos, Mignon’s robot friend. I’ve always dreamed of swimming, but sadly, I am not waterproof.
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And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.