Giving a lovely textbook definition below, L wrote:
“Glossophilia is a love of language, be it foreign or native. The term refers to a deep and passionate love for language and the structure of language. Glossophiles study literary terminology as well as grammar, punctuation and language structure. Glossophiles share an interest in lexical choice and imagery.”
I don’t know whether glossophiles are also generally nit-pickers, but I’ll bet it’s part of the genome. So I will add that MY purpose in this endeavour is to nit-pick. Actually, nit-correct! Not knit-pick – that’s what my nit-picking mother did after her concentration upon her needles and wool wavered for a moment (e.g. when she started nit-picking with one of us), and she had to REMOVE STITCHES. [I’ve done that on a few occasions when i didn’t want to return to the doctor after s/he sewed up a wound. Such behaviour sows bad feelings among medical professionals.]
L, a mother herself, is more lenient and forgiving than I, but can be a demon nit-picker as well. It’s probably why we first disliked one another (not each other) because of our competitive natures’ competing in the work-place. And also probably why we fell in, like thieves, once we recognized related sense of humor and figured out that it was toi et moi, baby – inside the workplace as well as outside it.
I don’t wish to stop the development of language, but I detest the throwing-out-of-the-baby-with-the-bathwater that my favorite language, ENGLISH, has been subjected to in a time when The Word (I refer not to the Bible) is more spoken than written – or written well. I do not blame its abuse upon “non-native-speakers”. So I will nit-pick here as in the rest of my life.
PS: I also love German and, to a lesser extent, French, as well as Italian. I can’t believe how much I love German, especially after hating it from a distance until my late ‘twenties, when I discovered German Lieder and began to learn the language from poets like Schiller and Goethe, through Schubert and Schumann’s songs (to name only a fraction). I speak French, but not Italian, and love how they sound when sung.
