It's funny and occasionally unsettling just how dependent perception is on language comprehension. When it comes to describing complex emotional experiences, words are often both insufficient and our only means of communication. As with everything in spoken language, emotional expression is a struggle between exactness and parsimony. Perhaps no concept is as difficult to convey as love. Maybe it's not so much because the emotion is too complex, but because the word itself isn't fit to do the job.

The English word "love" is of a hazy and possibly indeterminate origin. It is derived from an Old English word roughly pronounced "lufu", which may or may not be related to an ancient Germanic word "lubo". The problem here is that "lubo" is from a class of words attributed to Proto-Germanic, itself a theoretical language that modern linguists use as a shorthand for the potentially dozens of semi-related tongues spoken by tribal Germanic people around the age of Greco-Roman antiquity. The term may be even older than that considering the modern Russian word for love, "lublu". If the original word really is older than the split between Slavic and Western European languages, it may very well be as old as written language itself.

The problem we have today is that the English word "love" has found its way into an overly casual set of applications. The phrase "I love cake" is no less absurd than "I love my wife" even though those two (probably) mean two very different things. As such, we've clumsily added a small prepositional modifier, the word "in", to signify a deep, immediate and decidedly romantic variety of love.

English speakers have allowed our rather extensive lexicon of international words denoting love to fall into that dreaded category of superfluous, even decorative terms. Take the latinate "amore". While it's still alive and kicking as a solidly romantic term in Italian and French, English users have assigned it to terms like "amorous", which is more or less strictly sexual. Although English has taken much from Greek, we've entirely abandoned "agape" (ah-gah-pay), which is the closest approximation to "love" for sheer broadness. Ancient documents have agape describing everything from spousal affection to high quality meals.

But the ancient Greeks were so crazy about classification that they had individual words for several different kinds of love. In addition to agape, the ancients had "eros", the almost exclusively sexual kind of love from which we derive the modern word "erotic", "philia" which denoted a pure and categorically non-sexual love (despite modern psychology's use of it to describe sexual fetishes), and the very rare "storge" which describes a familial or even stately kind of affection. English only uses two of these and they're both applied to sexual terms, which seems to be a waste of their original nuance.

When the Bible-obsessed Middle Ages rolled around, the masters of language did their best to come up with a variety of terms that indicated what they would describe as "virtuous" love. As the church often did, they dipped into Latin and found their preferred term in "caritas", updated as "charity". In the liturgical sense, charity originally meant something very close to philia, a pure and virtuous love that would settle nicely with the PG aspirations of the cloth. The original Latin meaning crept back into regular usage, a suggestion of "costliness" becoming associated with providing material support to the needy rather than showing a broader affection for one's neighbors.

It's clear in the history of language that people have attempted several times to diversify the expression of love to capture the nuances of the emotion as it manifests in its myriad varieties, but somehow simplicity wins out. Every new linguistic branch comes back to a single word, even if that word isn't sufficiently exact to prevent confusion. That's what happens when you try to encapsulate an experience as old and universal as love. The ancient, clunky, broad term is as good today as it was thousands of years ago for the folks who spoke Proto-Indo-European.