I'm a girl here. I'm a neon-fogirty 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 really hard. Well, different languages

have different words for different kinds of love. 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 Bosody, a Creole word from

Trinidad and Tobago, to describe a dizzy and dazed happiness, a bewildered, discombobulated

joy, and Sharmoly P, 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 comes from what he calls untranslatable words from other

languages. He looked at words from around 50 languages. He says Greek have the most

words for love and then categorize 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 Mari, Welsh, and Spanish that in some way

described a feeling of love for a place. Quote, a place to stand on this earth, somewhere

...