When I was taking Spanish many years ago, we got to talking in class once about having a crush on someone. Our teacher, who was from Nicaragua, not only didn’t have a Spanish word for us for this phenomenon, she sort of suggested that this was some uniquely US-ian thing.
I don’t think so. I’m reminded of this because I recently learned that there’s a sort of fancy name for crush-like attachments: limerence.
Limerence is defined as “The state of being romantically infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically experienced involuntarily” (OED) or “an involuntary state of intense romantic desire” (Wikipedia).
Surprise number one about the word limerence is how new it is: it was coined in 1977 by the psychologist Dorothy Tennov, who was trying to understand how emotional states like this work. Of limerence, she writes that it’s a “state was one of madness, but the person undergoing the experience was not (necessarily) mad.” (One theory is that it’s all just chemicals.) She wrote a book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, which explored, via interviews with many people, the experience of being in different kinds of love.
I should now note that Tennov makes a distinction between a crush, which is what happens when people, typically youngsters, experience fleeting infatuations, and limerence, which is a strong attachment. (Feels like there’s some semantic overlap there, but that’s not important for now.)
A second surprise is the origin of the word: Tennov just made it up. According to an oft-quoted source, she first used the word amorance, then changed it to limerence. “Take it from me, it has no etymology whatsoever,” she said. That might be true in one sense, but she used lim- and not some other root, so there’s some basis there, even if she didn’t care to reflect on it.
A third but definitely non-surprise is that I’m late to the party. Nancy Friedman has written about limerence, and it was the subject of a post on the Languagehat blog. Apparently limerence is a word that the lexicographer Erin McKean wants people to use more.
To go back to Spanish class, limerence is clearly a universal phenomenon. Even the chemical nature of it seems to have been understood, as evidenced by Tristan and Isolde and every other story about love potions. But I still don’t know if there’s an exact equivalent in Spanish of the word crush.
On to origins. There was excitement in dictionary circles recently because an online version of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was unveiled a couple of weeks ago. If you don’t know about this dictionary, it’s worth reading at least the Wikipedia article about it. It was a monumental task, done by one person, to produce what we would think of as a modern dictionary: one that tried to cover all the words, not just “hard” ones, and that backed the definitions with citations from literature.
Anyway, access to Johnson’s dictionary can make it a bit easier to see how words have evolved since the 1750s. For example, take the word buxom. Today, the word means “ample of figure” and “full-bosomed” (AHD). But if you look in Johnson’s dictionary, you get different definitions: “1. Obedient; obsequious; 2. Gay, lively, brisk; 3. Wanton, jolly.” Johnson notes correctly that it goes back to an Anglo-Saxon word bugan, meaning to bend.
The meaning of buxom has meandered, with the first senses that Johnson lists having become obsolete. Each new meaning developed (apparently) as a metaphoric riff on a previous one. For example, here’s the sequence of meanings in the OED:
I.
1175: Obedient; pliant; compliant, tractable
1300: Submissive, humble, meek
1362: Gracious, indulgent, favourable; obliging, amiable, courteous, affable, kindly
1340: Easily moved, prone, ready
1590: Flexible, pliant
II.
1590: Blithe, gladsome, bright, lively, gay
1589: Full of health, vigor, and good temper; well-favoured, plump and comely, ‘jolly’, comfortable-looking (“chiefly of women”)
In particular, the “blithe” meaning and its development to “full of health” seems to have been a flex on the earlier “gracious, indulgent” sense, and you can see how that emerged from a sense of “bendable.”
Words take journeys in unpredictable directions. The best we can do is look backward and see (sometimes marvel) at the path the word has taken.
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