When I’m typing on my phone, with my clumsy fingers and thumbs, I frequently type live when I mean to type love. It has happened so many times that recently I began to wonder if I’m just a little tentative about the word love. I wondered if, unbeknownst even to me (as so much of me is, alas), my finger or thumb---whichever digit is in charge at the moment---oh-so-inconspicuously shifts over 0.6 key toward the center of the keyboard, transforming love into live. Masquerading (mild, common) psychopathology as an innocent typo.
Now, roughly 87% of the time I catch this and other typos after the fact, and correct this and other typos before sending the message. But recently I saw my friend make the same mistake. We had been talking (texting) about how much we enjoyed a certain Apple TV series. (Not Ted Lasso, if that’s what you were thinking.) After several well-formed and well-typed comments she wrote I live the music instead of I love the music.
Sometimes I point out her typos, and then she points out that I point out her typos. But this time, trying to improve my improvement behavior, I painstakingly switched off autopilot and thought about the situation for more than a microsecond. And it came to me: live and love are typonyms!
If you really love a piece of music, it penetrates your very bones with joy, and it makes complete sense that you live that music. When I typo one of my kids (i.e. adults) that I live something they have said or done or written recently, the love deep down in my soul has bubbled up! I live the joy they have brought to me.
At first I worried that assigning (i.e. making up) the word typonym could be contentious among a certain cohort, because live and love move in only one direction. You don’t type love when you mean live. Clearly if you call two words typonyms, they have to work both ways. That’s how synonyms and homonyms work. Probably other nyms, too. I am not entirely sure of the rules of nym, but surely symmetry is important.
I was still in a mood to think more than a microsecond before discarding the term typonym and assigning (i.e. making up) something more one-way, more valve-y. That tiny pause of restraint was rewarded with a nested insight: Heck, maybe some people are shy of using the word live in extreme phrases like I live my work. So they accidentally pretend to love their work. A much more acceptable statement—and yet, not very bold. Really rather insipid. Way less interesting to love your work than to live it. I have no follow up questions to someone saying, I love my work. At most I'd say, huh.
The vast majority of typos never rise to the elevated status of typonym pairs. Wait! Let me think for another microsecond. I could be wrong.
[Author's note: I have really struggled with the use of italics in this story. Suggestions welcomed---tolerance, even more so.]
Comments