Saturday, December 15, 2007

I ♥ language

In the bathroom of the Soma coffee house in Bloomington, IN, there is a chalkboard wall on which patrons are encouraged to leave bathroom-wall scribblings. Yesterday, someone wrote
I ♥ to pee.
The ♥ symbol is, of course, a well-established conventional way of writing "love." Recently, it has even moved over into spoken language, so that the sentence in question would be pronounced as "I heart to pee." ♥ that is, has become a verb of its own. However, the sentence on the bathroom wall struck me as ungrammatical, revealing a difference between ♥ and the synonymous "love." For, at least to my ear, ♥ can take only nouns and pronouns as objects, as in "I ♥ pancakes" or "I ♥ you." Specifically, an infinitive verb such as "to pee" should not follow ♥.

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