Love's Language Lost

Language changes. Words develop, evolve, change, become extinct. Every now and then a word long dropped from common usage crops up, usually in a poem or a song, triggering memory and a sense of loss.

Listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Guinnevere" the other day, I had just that experience. The word was "milady," as in: Guinnevere had green eyes/like yours, milady, like yours. And I felt a longing for that word. Milady -- a word showing respect and affection.

The original meaning of the word is "an English noblewoman, akin to the word milord." It belongs to a genteel time (genteel at least in our imaginings), a time of knights and damsels and heroic battles that rarely involved civilians; the word was how one addressed the Lady of the Manor. As such, the word died long ago, with those times.

But there is a somewhat poetic application to the word as well, the way CS and N meant it way back in 1967, and that is the poetic sense. My lover is my lady as well, and by addressing her in that way I show the world how much she means to me; even if I am a pauper, she remains my lady, milady fair.

I was raised to respect women. Even through the movement to establish equality and equal rights between the sexes (a road still under construction though in much better condition than ever before), that sense of respect remains, as it should. There is nothing wrong with having a romantic notion of the other sex as long as one does not transport oneself into a fantasy realm and starts actively looking for dragons. And just because men finally realize that women like sex, too, does not detract from women as people. It enhances them. After all, if it weren't for the fact that human females can have sex pretty much anytime, men would not stick around and societies never would have formed.

That's a fact.

As I told you last week, I am a philogynist -- a lover of women. It happens to be the 38th anniversary today of the day my bride and I became engaged. She is milady -- and a more perfect word could not exist for my head or my heart.

But no one uses it, and that's a sad loss.

Continued

There is a word for what I am. It's a fancy word, maybe four bits worth because I don't think I have ever seen it used before. Its opposite I know well, because that one is a loathsome creature.

I am reading a book about a paranoid schizophrenic who killed an innocent man he thought was a would-be assassin, then spent the rest of his life in a mental institution, contributing to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary for over twenty years. The book is called "The Professor and the Madman," by Simon Winchester. I am only a few pages into the book so far, but it has my attention.

At the back of the book are some of Winchester's personal favorite words from the OED, and this one stands out. The irony is that I found the word just casually flipping through the book, hours after finishing my latest blog.

The word is "philogynist," from "philogyny." Its opposite is misogynist, someone who dislikes, distrusts or outright hates women. Pilogynists love women; they prefer the company of women to that of men. Winchester notes that "the man who seeks out feminine company in preference to bonding with his brothers is much derided -- or much envied."

So I have a label!

I like talking to and listening to women. They like talking to and listening to me. It's a good arrangement. Everyone feels comfortable, at ease, and never threatened. I am like a brother to be confided in, and a buddy to be joked with or to do things with -- but I am not a friend with benefits. That last bit is not part of the equation: I am a happily married man an halve been for 37 and a half years, and everybody knows it.

I also like couples, but I don't know the word for that.

There are men in my life whom I respect and enjoy interacting with, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, and they tend to be philogynists like me. Funny, that.

Montana so far is a little lonely for me. This is not to complain, even though it sounds like complaining. I love my solitude, especially for the writing, and I have not made any changes that would socialize my existence. I have opitions I have not used -- volunteer work, perhaps, at the local library, for example. This means my loneliness is curablke and up to me. There always are options, always.

But I fear change. There's a word for that, too: metathesiophobia. Now that one's worth a buck fifty, easy.