Name: 【TED】Mandy Len Catron: A better way to talk about love (A better way to talk about love | Mandy Len Catron)
Uploaded: 2017-02-10T04:43:14.000Z
Duration: 15 min 18 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...

OK, so today I want to talk about how we talk about love.

I want to talk about what's wrong with how we talk about love.

Most of us will probably fall in love a few times

and in the English language, this metaphor, falling,

is really the main way that we talk about that experience.

what I picture is straight out of a cartoon --

without realizing it, he crosses over an open manhole,

and he just plummets into the sewer below.

And I picture it this way because falling is not jumping.

It's something that happens to us without our consent.

this is the main way we talk about starting a new relationship.

I am a writer and I'm also an English teacher,

which means I think about words for a living.

You could say that I get paid to argue that the language we use matters,

and I would like to argue that many of the metaphors we use

So our metaphors equate the experience of loving someone

of unforeseen and totally unavoidable circumstances.

which is the past participle of the word "smite."

And if you look this word up in the dictionary --

you will see that it can be defined as both "grievous affliction,"

I tend to associate the word "smite" with a very particular context,

In the Book of Exodus alone, there are 16 references to smiting,

which is the word that the Bible uses for the vengeance of an angry God.

Here we are using the same word to talk about love

that we use to explain a plague of locusts.

How have we come to associate love with great pain and suffering?

And why do we talk about this ostensibly good experience

I want to focus on one metaphor in particular,

When I first started researching romantic love,

I found these madness metaphors everywhere.

is full of language that equates love to mental illness.

"Got me looking, got me looking so crazy in love -- "

from the great philosopher, Beyoncé Knowles.

I fell in love for the first time when I was 20,

and it was a pretty turbulent relationship right from the start.

And it was long distance for the first couple of years,

so for me that meant very high highs and very low lows.

I was sitting on a bed in a hostel in South America,

and I was watching the person I love walk out the door.

we'd gotten into an argument over dinner,

he threw his things in the bag and stormed out.

While I can no longer remember what that argument was about,

I very clearly remember how I felt watching him leave.

I was 22, it was my first time in the developing world,

and I knew the name of the town that I was in,

and the name of the city that I needed to get to to fly out,

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【TED】Mandy Len Catron: A better way to talk about love (A better way to talk about love | Mandy Len Catron)

entire

mental

associate

experience