Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, 'love' is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loud-speakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word.

Words cycle through our daily vocabulary at different rhythms. Certain words stick with us for life, and remain immediately accessible to us at any moment: the names of loved ones, the building-block grammar of our native tongue, the primary colors and cardinal numbers, and so on. Other words wax and wane, in sync with forces larger than the individual speaking them: the fashionable vagaries of slang, the geek-speak of technological innovation, the “ethnic” idiom derived from broader demographic trends… Most words, however, lie somewherein between: drifting in and out of our regular vocabulary, like a band of itinerants cursed with a hankering to settle down.