This month at The Gloria Sirens we consider love, but in Siren fashion, we had to turn things around and upside down. We agreed, forget Valentine’s Day and romance, heartbreak and divorce, sex and chocolate and roses.

We asked ourselves, what is it we love more than our lovers? Even more than we love dogs, cats, and rabbits? Throughout our lives, what’s been more faithful to us than lovers and kin? What has given us the most freedom, power, and joy? What makes us most fully ourselves?

Words.

We are a sisterhood of logophiles, united in our passion for words, neurologically linked through our peculiar fascination with language.

If you are too, c’mon! Let’s throw a halter over the head of a favorite word and take it for a gallop.

• Month, from Old High German manod, meaning moon;
• February, from the Latin Februa, the festival of expiation;
• logophilia, from logo Greek for word or speech and philos for dear and beloved;
• love, meaning love, Old English lufu, Proto-Germanic lubo, German Liebe, Old Frisian liaf, Old High German liob, Dutch lief, Gothic liufs, Old Saxon liof, Old Norse lof, Old High German liubi, Lithuanian, liaupse, all meaning joy, praise, dear, beloved, desired, pleasing, love, love, love, love, love.

We love language, we sing praise to writers, we live for readers, we cherish poetry and prose and song. The dictionary is a box of bon-bons for the brain.

It’s not about “love language,” it’s not about how language is the vehicle of love, it’s bigger, deeper, more spiritual, vast.

It’s about how the word is god. Language is omnisicient, for all we mortals know is coded and created in language. Language is omnipresent, for everywhere our thought goes, everywhere two or more are gathered, there is language. And language is eternal, for the language of our brains, the language through which we know and become ourselves, precedes us and outlasts us.

Which means, when we speak, when we write, when we sing, when we say, “Let there be light,” we have drawn upon The Word, and so created light, at least in the noosphere, the sphere of thought enveloping our planet. That makes us lower-level gods.

This month, stick around, and see what we goddesses make of our best-loved words.