I 'heart' ♥

I 'heart' you. When I first read the three words, with the middle word guarded with the couple of apostrophes, I got confused. My first thought was that was a slang, with a different meaning from the common 'I love you'. And I'm not really good nor updated on slangs and lingos. I had meant to look up the meaning of that phrase at that time, but never got around doing it, until today.

From what I gathered from the writings of Wikipedia and some online dictionaries, 'heart' here simply is the written form to symbolize ♥, the symbol. So when someone writes 'I 'heart' you' it is mostly like they meant to write 'I ♥ you' but lack the knowledge or the patience to birth the symbol. Hence, the use of the 'guarded' heart' in most writings. My confusions sorted out, simple.

There are a variety of ♥ that you can type out, once you know the generative keys. Based on Wikipedia (2008), I learnt (who doesn't) that "The most common emoticon for the heart is <3. In Unicode, the heart symbol ("BLACK HEART SUIT") is U+2665, and it can thus be generated in HTML by typing ♥ or ♥, or by the HTML entity ♥ (♥). An unfilled heart symbol ("WHITE HEART SUIT", ♡) is U+2661, or ♡ or ♡. In Unicode, there is also a "HEAVY BLACK HEART" (❤) at position U+2764".

Over the years, I'm pretty sure we all have come across tons of phrases, signages, billboards, adverts and etc, which applies the ♥ in varying forms, limited only by creativity. Or sometimes, space. Big ♥, small ♥, red, white, blue, or empty, hollow, broken ♥. It's all out there, exploited by each and everyone of us. After all, the ♥'s most common connotations are that of love and affections, arguably the 2 most over-capitalized but underrated feelings of human kind. Of course, I'm not excluded.

I want to end by typing, 'I ♥ Wikipedia', 'I ♥ my imagination' & I ♥ coffee', the 3 ingredients I needed to conjure up this post.


[Wikipedia (2008), Heart(symbol), Wikipedia (website). Accessed : 5th Oct 2008]