You wouldn't guess from the title of this post that I'm going to write about love, would you?
Valentine's Day is, of course, on its way, and something has just occurred to me about one of the myriad silly ways we Americans use the word, "love." I hear people say about a friend or colleague that they "love him/her to death." It's an extravagant idiom, one whose proper place is perhaps epic poetry. But we don't utter it as a passionate vow. We use it as a warmup to saying something awful about someone:
"I love her to death, but she just never shuts up."
"I love him to death, but I wish he would actually call me back when I ask him to."
So it's not really about love, is it? It's more like self-exculpation. Like the way British people say "sorry" every two seconds: a neutral particle doing double-duty as a tepid plea for forgiveness.
