"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 14/02/18 (St Valentine's Day and love)

I'm realising now that that this may only appeal to 13% of our viewers, given the stats that you were giving about Valentine's Day at the beginning. Just going to talk a little bit about Valentines and love as well. There were two early Italian martyrs whose feasts was celebrated on St. Valentine's Day, and love didn't became associated with either of them until the Middle Ages. And two possible reasons for this. One is that there was a very old belief that birds mated on exactly this day, so they would find their life mate on St Valentine's Day, the feast of St Valemtine, which is very sweet. Another is that it's linked to a pagan fertility festival. Now, that was called Lupercalia, and it was held in honour of the fertility god, the Roman fertility god, Lupercus. So those are the two reasons possibly why we  associate love with - because it was a fertility day - with St Valentine's Day. But to take love itself, unsurprisingly, it's a very, very ancient word. It's existed as long as humankind has existed. And if you go back to the most ancient language that we've traced, which is an Inddo-European language, you will find it there. And it's shared by a Sanskrit word, lubhyati, which meant desire, and that incidentally also give us libido and the Latin word, libet, meaning "it's pleasing". It's related to other words in English, including lief, an old-fashioned word, my lief, which means dear of pleasant, but also very appropriately, love is linked to life itself. It shares the same ancient root, which I think is quite lovely. And just to flick briefly to tennis, because I think you love tennis. Love in tennis - a lot of people think that it's got everything to do with the shape of l'oeuf, the egg in French. It's actually not. We think it goes back to the idea of playing for love rather than for money, which is behind one of the ancient rules of the game. So there you go, a quick wirlwind tour of love, and apologies to anybody who actually really hates St Valentine's Day. I'll stop now.