‘Loved ones’ are everywhere at this time of year

‘My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, £2, new in at Morrisons.’

Most popular

Alexander Larman

Meghan Markle’s tone-deaf wildfire video is hard to stomach

Jonathan Sacerdoti

The audacity of Trump’s Gaza plan

Arieh Kovler

Trump’s Gaza plan is nothing but a mirage

Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts at this time of year. The astrologer Russell Grant warns Pisces about ‘a loved one’s wellbeing weighing on your thoughts’. At other times, loved ones are dead, the phrase being used without irony in broadcast reports of air disasters, war and inheritance tax. It annoyingly presumes that all relations who die are loved.

The Oxford English Dictionary finds examples of loved one from the 18th century onwards. It notes that in recent times it frequently makes conscious reference to the phrase in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One (1948), quoting this example: ‘I saw the Happy Resting Place of Countless Loved Ones. And I saw the Waiting Ones who still stood at the brink of that narrow stream that now separated them from those who had gone before.’ Waugh had taken his family to California in 1947. While there he visited Forest Lawn, with horrid fascination.

Curiously, Aldous Huxley had a similar experience two decades earlier, but in Chicago, as he recounted in Jesting Pilate in 1926. The telephone directory carried an advertisement for a firm of undertakers, or rather morticians: ‘Their motor-hearses were funereally sumptuous; their manners towards the bereaved were grave, yet cheering, yet purposefully uplifting; and they were fortunate in being able to “lay the Loved Ones to rest in – graveyard, the Cemetery Unusual”.’