{"id":3175,"date":"2022-06-29T12:19:16","date_gmt":"2022-06-29T11:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/?page_id=3175"},"modified":"2022-06-30T02:04:11","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T01:04:11","slug":"we-love-to-love","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/july-2022\/we-love-to-love\/","title":{"rendered":"We Love to Love*"},"content":{"rendered":"

Keith Wilson<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b>Recently the news has, even more than usual, seemed to be full of sorrow and suffering. To provide a little contrast, I decided to pen (key?) a few words about love. This wasn\u2019t a random choice. As some of you may know, I\u2019m currently carrying out research at the University of Birmingham and Woodbrooke into whether the language used by British Quakers differs from that used by non-Quakers. Spoiler alert! What I\u2019ve discovered to-date suggests that it does.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t bore you with details, although I\u2019ll gladly bore you interminably if you\u2019re incautious enough to ask for further information. Suffice it to say that I\u2019ve collected text from 2,900 articles published in The Friend <\/i>and Quaker News <\/i>between January 2000 and April 2020. After a lot of statistical faffing around, I\u2019ve found that this text uses the word \u2018love\u2019 significantly more often than it is used in language more generally. That makes \u2018love\u2019, in linguistics jargon, a keyword.<\/p>\n

Actually, \u2018love\u2019 isn\u2019t on its own; I found another 145 keywords to keep it company. That\u2019s topics for the next 12 years of articles for Forty-Three sorted! But let\u2019s not get carried away; today\u2019s word is \u2018love\u2019.<\/p>\n

Quakers write a lot about love. Confirming this is gratifying but it might be more interesting to know what they say about love. I could write you an essay but, by feeding my text into a fascinating piece of software called Sketch Engine\u00ae<\/sup>, I can do something much more interesting. I can show you what Quakers are saying about love.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The graphic may look complicated, but it isn\u2019t. Some words are a like magnets: they attract each other. If you read the word \u2018peace\u2019 for example, you wouldn\u2019t be surprised to find the word \u2018quiet\u2019 nearby. Similarly for \u2018water\u2019 and \u2018drink\u2019.<\/p>\n

The diagram simply shows words that, in my text collection, are attracted to \u2018love\u2019. The stronger the attraction, the closer the word is to the centre of the diagram; the more often the word occurs close to \u2018love\u2019 in the articles, the bigger the coloured blob it sits on.<\/p>\n

Different grammatical relationships are identified with different colours, and blobs of a particular colour are loosely collected into sectors. To improve readability, the sectorisation is somewhat random, so it\u2019s best to use the colours as a guide.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re so inclined, you can make your own interpretations of the graphic. You probably won\u2019t be surprised, for example, that \u2018love and truth\u2019 is the strongest and most frequent relationship, nor that \u2018divine\u2019 and \u2018love\u2019 are strongly related. But why do \u2018true\u2019 and \u2018love\u2019 have a more distant relationship? And is it only me that finds it interesting so see a strong relationship between love and wisdom?<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the conclusion? How about \u201cQuakers write a lot about love, and they write about it in many contexts\u201d? In other words, it looks like we Quakers love to love \u2013 which surely can\u2019t be such a bad thing in today\u2019s troubled world.<\/p>\n

*Apologies to Tina Charles!<\/p>\n

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Forty-Three<\/em> Newsletter \u2022 Number 519 \u2022 July 2022
\n<\/strong>Oxford Friends Meeting
\n43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW<\/p>\n

newsletter@oxfordquakers.org<\/a><\/p>\n

Copyright 2022, Oxford Quakers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Keith Wilson \u00a0Recently the news has, even more than usual, seemed to be full of sorrow and suffering. To provide a little contrast, I decided to pen (key?) a few words about love. This wasn\u2019t a random choice. As some of you may know, I\u2019m currently carrying out research at the University of Birmingham and … Continue reading We Love to Love*<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"parent":3145,"menu_order":7,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3175","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3175"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3252,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3175\/revisions\/3252"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxfordquaker.com\/newsletter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}