Love! sure the word is formed on purpose out of the prettiest soft vowels and consonants in the language.

-William Thackeray Barry Lyndon

My General semantics professor at Carleton University always identified as one of the major barriers to communication the fact that in the English language there are not as many words as things - in other words (so to speak), some words have to do multiple duties since the things they describe are very different.

He pointed out that the word 'love' is such a word. We say that we love our jobs, our wives, our cars, our children, our pets, the game of basketball or cricket, ice cream, chocolate, going to the seaside or taking a drink. Yet, all these have to be different emotions covered by the same word. As he commented, "Surely, the emotion that you feel for your wife is not the same emotion that you feel for your car or your pet. If so you badly need psychiatric assistance."

As far back as the 18th century, Henry Fielding was commenting in Tom Jones, "She was in love, according to the present universally received sense of that phrase, by which love is applied indiscriminately to the desirable objects of all our passions, appetites and senses, and is understood to be that preference which we give to some kind of food rather than to another." In the Caribbean, our disregard for punctuality means that Time is nothing but a foreign magazine and love is nothing (especially in tennis).

A rose by any other name might smell just as sweet, but there are 150 different types of roses so that rose is not rose is not rose even if there are rows and rows of them in a flower show and people get into major rows about the virtues of the different varieties.

It is why the recent claim that the English language recently reached its one-millionth word is being so fiercely disputed. One commentator pointed out that first of all you have to clear up what constitutes a word. The millionth word identified by the Texas-based company, Global Language Monitor (GLM), as having come into official existence at 10:22 a.m. GMT on Wednesday, June 10, is 'Web 2.0'. Many people argue that 'Web 2.0' is not a word. So, are we still short of a million words? Not if you count from zero to a million.

any sensible answer

AskOxford.com, the website of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) compilers, states, "There is no single sensible answer to this question. It is impossible to count the number of words in a language, because it is so hard to decide what counts as a word. Is dog one word, or two (a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently')? If we count it as two, then do we count inflections separately too (dogs, plural noun; dogs, present tense of the verb). Is dog-tired a word, or just two other words joined together?

Increasingly, people are coming to the conclusion that the number of words in the language is immaterial. What is more important is the way we use them and the many different meanings that words have. Punsters are perhaps the people who best understand the flexibility of language and the power to go beyond numerical limitations. For instance, it is difficult (if not impossible) to find a joke without a dirty word or obscenity in it. Here is one with no obscenities that demonstrates the dexterity of the English language.

Two tall trees, a birch and a beech, are growing in the woods. A small tree begins to grow between them and the beech says to the birch, "Is that a son of a beech or a son of a birch?" The birch admits the he cannot tell. Just then, a woodpecker lands on the sapling. The birch says, "Woodpecker, you are a tree expert. Can you tell if that is a son of a birch or a son of a beech?" The woodpecker takes a taste of the small tree. He replies, "It is neither a son of a beech nor a son of a birch. It is, however, the best piece of ash I have ever put my pecker in."

Tony Deyal who is several inches under six feet was last seen saying to his wife, 'It is better to have loved a short man than never to have loved a tall.'