i_mean sixteen I mean, I'm being entirely honest, and this is blunt and simple. I like you. Its like when I was in elementary school, saying "I like you" to a boy was a really simple thing. "I like you" meant something. It was significant. Now, the word Love is thrown around like a fucking hackysack. 030616 ... endless desire it's something i say too often and i am going to try and write this blathe without saying it but it is nearly impossible for me. i use it as frequently as i use the word 'the' it's just the way i am. and i've wanted to use it this whole blathe, so i am just going to give in. i think the word love is overused and quickly becomes cliche. i mean you'd think we could all just find another way to say something powerful but we are thrown in the bag with everyone using the same words over and over until we are desensitized to them. there were times when it used to be a big deal. you see it in old movies all the time. girls calling up their friends, "oh_my_god, he said 'i love you' i can't believe it. blah blah blah" but what do old movies know anyways? whatever. 030616 ... User24 it's true, you say "i love you" too much and become synonymous with "hello" mind you, that happens to all words if they get overused. 030617 ... a thimble in time I agree. The word "love" gets cheapened when we say things like "I love chicken" or "I love LA". If we truly loved chickens we wouldn't kill them, and if Angelinos earnestly believed LA to be sacred they would stop polluting the air with their SUV's. 030617 ... a thimble in time Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "The more meanings a word has the more meaningless it becomes." 030617 ... endless desire wow that is very true the more i think about it. though, it really does have a lot to do with how often the word is said. . .but jeez. love has so many meanings and is tossed around in the most pointless of ways. excellent observation thimble. 030617 ... phil love is not a normal thing it's very strange and probably dangerous it can turn a nonthreatening individual into some sort of a depressed psycho when their love is not accepted. I have had people say drunk, I love you. But from anyone that I loved... 030623 ... phil so hearing I love you, and giving no serious response to it, could really bother some people. 030623 ... ClairE "The more meanings a word has the more meaningless it becomes." Definitely disagree. Words are invigorated and shifted and changed by acquiring, and losing, different meanings. To take your example of the word "love", we can summarize by saying: The statement that something is loved is cheapened (in a sense of meaning-value) by a more general use of the term "love". The word "love" loses a specificity in this context, I agree. Does it lose actual meaning? No. In fact, you are using the word "meaningless" to mean a specific loss of meaning, while ignoring the meaning of "meaningless" as a referent for a total loss of meaning, as well. In reality, while the proportion of the usage of the term "love" may be skewed towards a new meaning that is less "intense" (for want of a better term), this is in reality an expansion on the various meanings of the word "love". Just a semantics rant from yours_truly. As for whether using the word "love" where a word such as "like" might be more appropriate takes away from the intensity of the usage of "love" in statements where we expect it to be used in the more serious sense, such as in "I_love_you"...that's an interesting conjecture. I could definitely see that there are probably cases where someone would only be able to tell someone "I_love_you" because of the flexibility in interpretation of the statement. I don't think the statement in general is cheapened, though, and I'm curious as to whether it's a new phenomenon (in a historical sense). Personally, I like to view the increasing flexibility of any term, as you describe with "love", as positive, or at the very least, something that is worth study. 031117 ... misstree and her two pennies the more meanings a word has, the more it is capable of carrying, and the more likely it is to be misinterpreted. "love" is an exceedingly good example, and i ranted for a bit on that blathe about how i personally view the more powerful form of the word (different than most, it would seem)... but what it really shows is that, for words that are so open to wiggling, you really have to have some idea of what kind of brain it's coming out of. 031117 ... oldephebe nicely done ClaireE 031117 ... x i not nice 031117 ... minnesota_chris you do the things you want to do. Very very rarely is anyone forced into something they don't want. 031118 ... Evil Twin of Dead Plant i love x 031118 ... kipper I had forgotten how much i love ClairE. You are wonderful... 040401 ... In_Bloom If I were a man then I'd choose to be your kind of man and not that I want to be a man instead of me. You loving me made me very content as I am. I mean, you thought I was incredible. 080817 what's it to you? who go blather from