IT is a good idea to celebrate Valentine’s Day while it still retains its original flavour because the whole paradigm of romance is in a state of flux and might soon become unrecognisable. Red roses and lilting melodies are as outdated as poor Saint Valentine’s good intentions! Witness, the number of parents lamenting their offspring’s single status! This lends credibility to the youngsters’ whining on and on about helicopter parents who never grow up. Ned Zeman defined a helicopter parent as ‘A nosy grown-up who’s always hovering around. Quick to offer a teacher unwanted help’ (Buzzwords, Newsweek, September 9, 1991).

The words that figure here have not reached the dictionary, but they definitely are a part of the lexicon as the user of the language has accepted them. This indicates that Valentine’s Day is fated to be a frenzy of celebration and not a festival of true love and faithful hearts.

An urban male with a strong aesthetic sense who spends a great deal of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle is a metrosexual, proud of his metrosexuality. Young women today many a time echo the sentiments of Alexa Hackbarth: "A metrosexual, in case you didn’t catch any of several newspaper articles about this developing phenomenon, is a straight man who styles his hair using three different products (and actually calls them ‘products’), loves clothes and the very act of shopping for them and describes himself as sensitive and romantic" (Vanity, Thy Name Is Metrosexual, The Washington Post, November 17, 2003).

Metro or city as a prefix indicates this man’s purely urban lifestyle. Sexual, the suffix, comes from homosexual, meaning that this man, although he is not homosexual, embodies the heightened aesthetic sense often associated with certain types of gay men.

Mark Simpson invented this term in 1994 and it drifted slowly from one media source to another throughout the rest of the 1990s and the early 2000s. Then Simpson wrote another article about metrosexuals in the online magazine Salon.com on July 22, 2002, and the term took off: "The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis — because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference" (Meet the metrosexual, Salon.com, July 22, 2002). Since then metrosexual has been picked up by media, has made numerous TV appearances and has spawned at least a couple of books.

A whole new range of different people is emerging from the melting pot that is today’s world. There is the unmarried man who is selfish, insensitive and afraid of commitment, called the toxic bachelor. Candace Bushman coined this expression in the mid 1990s for one of her ‘Sex and the City’ columns written for The Observer. Then, there is the LAT couple, living apart together. This refers to an unmarried couple having separate residences while maintaining an intimate relationship.

Tap-root

In its original Sanskrit form, sneh is derived from the base that means ‘to adhere or stick’. As love, sneh evolved figuratively: you are ‘attached’ or you ‘stick’ to the person you love. Bhakti (God), shraddha (elders), prem (in general), pranay (lovers) and sneh (those younger) are all shades of love created by usage.

This feature was published on February 14, 2004