The difficulty of a declaration of love opens up quasi-philosophical concerns about language. If I told Chloe that I had a stomachache or a garden full of daffodils, I could count on her to understand. Naturally, my image of a bedaffodiled garden might slightly differ from hers, but there would be reasonable parity between the two images; words would operate as reliable messengers of meaning. But the card I was now trying to write had no such guarantees attached to it. The words were the most ambiguous in the language, because the things they referred to so sorely lacked stable meaning.
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