Name: A Dictionary of Love
Uploaded: 2026-03-18T16:32:57.000Z
Duration: 3 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

In our worst moments in couples, we tend to assume that our problems are unfixable, that we simply don't get on, that we're the wrong sort of people to be together.

Reflexive pronouns

What we tend not to do is imagine that we have a problem of dictionaries, that our fundamental problem is that our partner and ourselves are beneath the surface, following dictionary definitions that don't align.

Transition words & phrases

We're squabbling because we don't understand what the same things mean for each one of us, because we're using the same words and terms without realizing that each of us has an entirely different understanding of their natures.

We imagine, as we try to live with someone else, that there isn't a gap in the way that we both define concepts like, for example, delays in answering a message or leaving the bathroom messy or spending time with friends.

It simply doesn't occur to us who've been wielding certain phrases and concepts one way since early adolescence, that we might have encountered someone who sees them very differently.

It appears self evident to us that a messy bathroom means a bathroom whose owner has shown us no respect, who's vicious, unkind, uncaring and out to harm us.

It's totally natural, as natural as our understanding of the word chair or glass, that spending time with friends means a chance to rejuvenate, to take the pressure off a couple and achieve some necessary distance before returning to cosiness once more.

What we're forgetting in all this is the noble and arcane discipline of etymology that is the history and genealogy of language.

It's the people we call etymologists who will carefully trace where a given word comes from.

They will tell us, for example, that window comes from the old Norse word vindauga, meaning windeye.

Or that klew comes from the Greek klothos, meaning ball of thread, after that thread that Ariadne gave Theseus to escape the labyrinth.

what we need as much, if not more of is a form of emotional etymology that is an effort to trace back words and terms to their sources.

In the lives of lovers, couples need to see that they're fighting very often simply because they are using the same terms in different ways.

A habit of leaving a bathroom in a mess may not, in fact, in one's own dictionary, stem from any kind of desire to harm.

Maybe it just emerged from a wish to escape a punishing parental figure who, while emotionally very cold placed, undue and unwelcome emphasis on etiquette and order, just as in a neighbouring dictionary, the very same phrase might stand for shallowness and selfishness, for imitating the behaviour of a despised step parent.

It might be an emblem of disdain and cruelty.

All this points to what we should do in our arguments before we imagine what our partner means.

Before we settle on an explanation that involves insult and a desire to harm, we should always take care to remember dictionaries.

We should pause our fights to wonder if our partner isn't simply mad or evil.

They may just have a different dictionary definition in mind.

We need to do one another the favour of some dictionary work.

We should ask one another what a term means and then analyze how it came to have this meaning for them.

We may not be beyond comprehension at all.

We just need to understand what is in our respective dictionaries and.