Thursday, February 10, 2022

Valentines-Falling in Love

 

                     The rise and fall of love

 

                                         by

 

                                 Howard Richler

 

                                 Wise men say

                                 only fools rush in

                                 but I can’t help

                                 falling in love with you

(Lyrics from Can’t Help Falling in Love written by Weiss, Peretti and Creatore)

 

 

Falling in Love, Falling in Love Again, Why Do Fools Fall in Love, When I Fall in Love, ‘Til I Fell in Love with You,…. The song titles featuring  the act of ‘falling in love” are seemingly endless. But hold on a second, lovers. Isn’t  “falling” a bad thing to do?”

 

My friend David posed  this dilemma to me   recently and  he inquired whence came  the expression “falling in love.”

 

So I checked the OED to see if it could provide an  adequate lexicographic answer to David’s query.  The phrase “falling  in love” is first cited in 1423 .  At first, though,  one didn’t merely  tumble “in love” but rather into “love’s dance.”  The citation comes from James 1-The King’s Quire and states, “So fare I falling into love’s dance.” It took  at least one hundred more years for the phrase to be shortened to “”falling in love.” This phrase has endured ever since as the quintessential  expression  of the dizzy loss of control of the lovestruck.

 

The OED has many definitions of the word “fall”, but two in particular are instructive of the sense implied in “falling in love.”  Fall(noun) is defined as “a succumbing to temptation, a lapse into sin or folly. It is first used in this sense in 1225.  Fall (verb) is defined as “to yield to temptation, to sin.”

 

By the way, the  concept of a fall into love is hardly restricted to English. In French  and many other languages  love causes a fall  and in the case of Icelandic it captures you.

 

Legend has it that  the romance associated with Valentine’s  Day  descends  from a custom in ancient Rome. On the eve of the Feast of Lupercalia,  which began on February 15th,  the names of maidens were written on pieces of paper and placed in  a jar. These slips were then plucked by  young men who would partner with their selection for the duration of the festival.  Valentine’s Day owes its name to Saint Valentine who was beheaded  in the  second century A.D for marrying couples counter to the orders of Emperor Claudius 11.

 

Etymologically speaking  when a young lover is imbued with romance, the debt isn’t to love, but to Rome. The word “romance” comes from the Old French term Romans, a derivation of Romanus, “Roman.” The term was used to refer to the local dialects of Latin(which  later became the Romance languages) and was used to differentiate them from official Latin. The practice arose in France of writing  entertaining stories in the more popular spoken language and the term romans was used to refer to these adventurous tales.  It was in this sense that the word was borrowed into Middle  English. Because  many of these stories in  both English and French dealt with courtly love, ”romance” came to mean simply a “love story” and eventually developed the sense of a ‘love affair.”

 

Seeing that William Shakespeare  is the greatest word progenitor in the history of the English language, it is not surprising that several love words are associated with the Bard.  Shakespeare seems to have coined the term  “love affair” in Three Gentlemen of Verona in 1591 where Valentine  says “I part with thee, confer at large of all that may concern thy love affairs.”  There is an obscure reference  to “love letters” in the OED in 1240 but Shakespeare  popularized the term in Merry Wives of Windsor when Mrs. Page asks “I ‘scaped love-letters in the holiday-time of  my beauty, and  am I now a subject for them?”

 

Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe is credited with the first usage of “love at first sight” In Hero and Leander in 1593: “ Where both deliberate the love is slight; who ever loved,  that loved not at  first sight?”

 

The 16th and 17th centuries featured some  language of love that has vanished from our lexicon. The word muskin  was a term of endearment for a woman,  to halch was to clasp in ones arms, and  an amoret was a term that could refer to a sweetheart, a love sonnet or a love glance .The 17th century was not noted as an age of gender neutralization as seen in the term mistress-piece which denoted a “masterpiece of female beauty.” A synonym for kiss was the term smick as is noted in the Bagford Ballad of 1685:  You smack, you smick, you wash, you lick, you smirk, you swear, you grin.”

 

And whence comes the word “kiss?”  “Kiss” is  a widespread Germanic  word, represented by the German  küssen, Dutch kussen, Swedish kyssa, and Danish kysse. It probably goes back to some prehistoric syllable that imitated the sound or action of kissing. There is not sufficient linguistic evidence to state whether our ancient Indo-European ancestors expressed affection to each other through the action of kissing.

 

Happy, Valentine’s Day, everybody.  Enjoy the dance.

 

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