According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the word with the most meanings in English is the verb ‘set’, with 430 senses listed in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
But I feel the most misunderstood word in the history of words would be “love”. Millions of years ago when humans invented signs and languages they also had to define the feeling called love. Probably, it would have been a harrowing assignment for the person who was entrusted with this task of defining love — of making sure that for all the years and centuries to come, and new humans that would walk on the face of the earth would have to live with this definition of this particular feeling which keeps changing as he sits down to define it.
Was it love when the 6th grader in you saw the 10th grader near the cycle stand trying to adjust his seat coyly smiling at you? The fuzzy feeling would not leave your stomach and you thought maybe it was the packets of chips you ate for lunch while happily donating your homemade lunch to your friends. I wish it was the packet of chips. It would not have taken you years to get over that feeling.
Will you call it love when the barista remembers your exact order and always slips in an extra cookie with a smiley face on it? His eyes light up every time you walk into the coffee shop and under his breath, he keeps humming a particular song that sits in tune with the hissing sound of the coffee machine. There’s also a little note that he writes for you every day on a paper napkin and places it under the coffee mug. It has generic quotes taken off the internet like “Smile, it is a beautiful day”, but you love it and collect them all. You both have a life where you do not think of each other, but those 15 minutes every morning is your love story.
Was it love when you gave up your window seat to be able to sit next to your “friend” for that 7-hour-long journey so that you could hear him recite the same drunk story for the 200th time? Maybe he will always believe that somehow that day looking out of the window 33000 feet above the sea made you dizzy. Dizzy with love, that only you knew but never could explain.
The strange desire to have a fictional (or real) lover in each new country or new city that you visit. To see it through his eyes, walk hand in hand when he takes you to his regular dive bar, his coffee spot, his bus stop, the sandwich place that is permanently shut now, the old building tucked inside an alley that maps could not find where he believes the sun sets the best. Getting on a train to a nondescript town where he was born, the house where he kissed for the first time, the trees he climbed, the friends he made and lost. There’s one ‘he/she’ in every city waiting for you to come back. You don't speak the same language but you don’t need a translator either. Define this for me, please!
There are scientific definitions and there are artistic definitions of what love is or what love feels like. You can pick up any definition you like, sometimes on a sunny day you pick up the dead poet’s definition that “love is the connection of two lost souls calling out for each other” and on a long winter night of longing, you may find solace that it is nothing but a concoction of neuropeptides and neurotransmitters, stimulated by 3 chemicals in the brain: noradrenaline that stimulates adrenaline production causing that racing heart and sweaty palms; dopamine, the feel-good chemical; and phenylethylamine that is released when we’re near our crush, giving us butterflies in our tummies.
