Words for Love and Sex
Do our words bias our thoughts? Consider how differently we treat words for love and sex.
Words related to "love" tend to refer to usefully distinct concepts. Words like "affection, devotion, fondness, and infatuation" describe identifiably different relationships and feelings. But when we want to describe our affections for each other, we tend to gravitate to the common word "love."
Words related to "sex," in contrast, tend to refer to pretty much the same concept. Words like "intercourse, copulation, coitus, congress, relations" have a very similar connotation. Some other words that don’t go in a family blog give connotations that vary along a spectrum of shock value, and sometimes identify alternative physical positions. But while we can construct concepts that describe differing sex details or context, we don’t seem much interested in communicating those details. Nevertheless, we go out of our way to use a wide variety of words for "sex."
Perhaps those who use different words instead of "love" tend to be less focused on an exclusive relation with a single person, and so we gravitate to "love" to avoid this appearance. Perhaps we use different words for "sex" in order to signal that we don’t consider our sex partners to be easily interchangeable with others.
Whatever the reasons, it seems that using a common word can distract us from useful distinctions, while using differing words can distract us from commonalities. Thanks to Colleen Berndt for suggesting the topic.
My non-english language skill are pretty limited but I remember in spanish the difficulty many people had with the verb gustar. Its the opposite of disgustar which we don't have (not as an antonym of disgust at least) in english. There seemed to be at least a little bit of a common difficulty to the beginning spanish speaker to think of using gustar in a lot of places one might say love but really mean "pleasing to me" instead of any type of romantic love. This conflating of more meanings onto the word love in english and the subsequent difficulty in understanding how another language doesn't do that works seems like it could be used in support of your thesis.
Of course then this countries conservative moral outlook tends to cause (church ladies voice) sex to be treated as something the has to be whispered about. In a self perpetuating manner this creates a situation where we are not as comfortable talking about sex and don't have the number of words or spread of meanings which makes it easy to talk about.
Gorden, a great question - any multilingual folks care to comment?