Welcome to Romantic Semantics, a blog about words and meaning.

Here, Romantic means “of or relating to” Romanticism, a period of literature (and music and art, too) with some distinct and awesome right-brained characteristics. When a person or thing is Romantic, he/she/it values and expresses:

- Spontaneous and profound emotion over reason
- Imagination as man’s most essential capacity
- Music, art, beauty, love, the natural world, etc. as teachers, touchstones and Truth

There’s much more to be said about the Romantic period, but that definition explains how I’ll use it here. I like the way Romantic authors find and make meaning. I seek to imitate it.

Semantics, the study of the meanings of words, is the second half of “the point” of this blog. Through this left-brained, analytical process, I’ll parley my love of the English language into another method of meaning-making.

Romantic Semantics, then, is both an outlet for my nerdiness and a way for me to understand and communicate things that mater to me.  What I’ll do here is take something from my world and write about it as both a word (semantics, etymology, etc.) and a thing of significance (for one reason or another). I’ll pull some meaning out of things and put some other meaning back into them.

Enjoy!