"Polyamory is wrong"

[bunsen_h]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v622/subbybear/polyiswrong.jpg

Not my doing; it was linked from the "User Friendly" comments.

-- On further searching, I found the source.

Comments

[henrytroup.livejournal.com]

So is television

[beable]

And anyways the "many" for multi may be closer to the Greek root mala:

multi-, mult- + (Latin: much, many; combining form of Latin multus "much, many"; which is related to the Greek mala, "very, very much, exceedingly"). (page 5)

And malaamory or malaphilia just sounds stupid.

Besides which, vide our discussion about flour divination and the mixed latin/greek root thing, some Latin includes some Greek roots anyways, so the whole purity of language thing makes as much sense as calling Delenn (even pre-changover) a pure Minbari.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

To me, "malaphilia" doesn't sound stupid, just not at all like what's intended. "Lover of badness" or "lover of wrongness" (and nothing to do with what Inara feels).

[beable]

And there you go, mixing your Greek and your Latin.

[beable]

Besides, based on this Wikipedia entry, I word argue that polyagápe makes a helluva lot more sense than polyphilia.

In terms of whomever did that shirt, pedants should do their homework.
I'm willing to consider reasoned argument that philia better describes poly love than agápe (which can describe the kind of love one has for a spouse, or one's children, i.e. one's family).

If philia is a more general love - family, friends, than by the philia version of love we would all be poly - I love many of my friends, but I am not in love with them.

So anyways, a shirt complaining that OMG mixed roots with no indication that sufficient pedantry was used to actually determine what the correct word would be just annoys me.

[henrytroup.livejournal.com]

CS Lewis defines the Four Loves

storge
eros
agape
philia

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Heh.

Where did the idea come from, that it's wrong to mix word-roots from different languages in coining English words? We do it all the time - well, often enough that it isn't remarkable. Television. Aquaphobia. Biathlon. They're called hybrids.

Most people don't know or care that the roots are mixed. Why should they? These words are legitimately English, adopted in Engish's normally nondiscriminate way. And polyamory is a fine, well-established English word.

Down with pedantry!

(I think the shirt is funny, though.)

[(Anonymous)]

*snicker* You guys are just such awesome word-geeks. :)

The t-shirt reminds me of "The Internet is Wrong". :)

[kattale.livejournal.com]

That was me... my internet connection keeps going down and logging me out. :(