I Hate It. No, Wait, I Love It.

[zoobyshoe]

I over heard a guy talking at a coffehouse yesterday who said "I used to hate this song, but now I love it." I felt compelled to turn around, barge into the conversation, and ask "What made you change your mind?" Luckily he didn't take offense to the interruption and appreciated my interest. After thinking he decided that at some point he had actually paid full attention to the whole song and realized it wasn't what he'd been assuming from superficial listenings.

I think this switch from hating something to loving it is a very interesting emotional dynamic.

What did you used to hate that you now love, and what made you change your mind?

 

[-Job-]

I used to really hate pineapple. It was mostly because of its texture, it didn't feel like regular fruit to me. At one point i made myself eat a piece of pineapple as if it were a piece of fruit and not something weird. I thought to myself "this makes sense". And now i love pineapple.

 

[scott_alexsk]

I don't know why people use such extreme words as hate and love when describing insignificant things. He does not love the song, he justs likes it. Really it is just the difference between like and dislike though still opposite is still not as extreme as love and hate. It is easier with minor things such as a song to make a change from like to dislike. However a change from love to hate is much more extreme. I would say any change in view that is extreme requires a tramatic change, being event, revelation, etc. Otherwise I would say the person has a emotional disorder if he can make a change like that easily.
-scott

 

[zoobyshoe]

I don't know why people use such extreme words as hate and love when describing insignificant things.

Wake up and smell the informal, everyday usage, bud.

 

[scott_alexsk]

I wonder how this informal use came to be? Other cultures make more distinction between these words. Maybe Honestrosewater knows.
-scott

 

[wolram]

I did like ham when i was a kid, but now the smell of a boiling ham joint
makes me feel ill, i have no memory of what triggered this change.
the same with beef dripping, i used to love it spread on bread, but now the
thought of it makes me queezey.
whereas, the thought of eating blue cheese was repugnant, but now after trying it some years ago i love it.

 

[Chi Meson]

whereas, the thought of eating blue cheese was repugnant, but now after trying it some years ago i love it.

All the "stinky cheeses." (In moderation, of course). Gorgonzola is amazing.:tongue2:

There seems to have been a switch that got thrown when I was about 25. With no deliberate effort, lots of things suddenly became palatable. Brussel sprouts are the only thing still on the "hate" list. I think this is more tied to a memory of disgustingly boiled brussel sprouts on my plate when growing up.

 

[SpaceTiger]

With music, I'll only switch from hate to love if the hate was ideological. It's common for musicians to write songs that give the exact opposite impression from what was intended (like "Born in the USA" or "Crash"), so this has happened to me before. With food, I don't know if I've ever had such a dramatic reversal. Aversions tend to stick with me indefinitely.

With women, it's entirely different. I love to hate my girlfriends and sometimes the words are even synonymous. Hate can be really hot.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Pregnancy changed my tastes. I had never liked pine nuts and didn't care too much either way about mint, corriander, fresh basil and rocket. I began to like pine nuts in pregnancy and craved the others. I still crave the others and its been a while since I was pegnant.

 

[honestrosewater]

I wonder how this informal use came to be? Other cultures make more distinction between these words. Maybe Honestrosewater knows.
-scott

Nope, sorry, and off the top of my head, I can't think of any shortcuts to figure it out. I'm also still very much learning, so though I do try to be careful, I hope no one takes anything that I say as the gospel truth.

From a quick search, it looks like you could potentially 'trace' some form of love and hate back thousands of years, possibly more than 6000. But not every speaker uses a language the same way -- each speaker has an idiolect, their own personal version of the language, which can change over time -- so describing real world usage is a generalization game to begin with, plus these distinctions of degree are finer and, I imagine, allow for more wiggle room (which is usually not good when looking for patterns). Add to that that you might simply not have enough data, which is more likely as you go further back in time, and it ends up looking like a very laborious thing to trace even when possible. So if you still want to go, how far back?

Some major divisions (approx. dates)

*Proto-Indo-European : 4500 BC --> 2500 BC
     *Proto-Germanic : 1000 BC -->  0 BC/AD 
         Old English :  600 AD --> 1100 AD
      Middle English : 1100 AD --> 1500 AD
      Modern English : 1500 AD --> present

(~1450 AD : printing press in Europe, probably a significant 
date for written documentation)

(In historical, a.k.a. diachronic, lingustics, a * precedes a language, word, or other unit to indicate that the unit is unattested, i.e., no direct evidence of it, such as written documents, is known to exist, though some evidence might of course be discovered in the future. These hypothetical ancestors are reconstructed from their descendants using laws of language change, especially laws of sound change.
Incidentally, it has happened that linguists' reconstruction predictions have been confirmed by later-discovered archaelogical evidence. If interested, look up comparative method, Laryngeal Hypothesis, Kurgan Hypothesis.)

Actually, maybe I can think of one lead: very. But first, realize that you don't know when the narrower and wider meanings of love or hate were present, e.g., the 'informal' use might have been first.

You're talking about a word being used in extreme cases. Modern English has ways of modifying a word to convey these extreme cases. We can do so by creating compounds or phrases: dislike very much, like the most, best-liked, etc. If, at a given time, there is a single word, e.g., love, in wide use with the same meaning as the longer expressions, you might see those longer expressions being used less, if they are present at all (depending on some other factors). Sure, it's not much of a lead, but don't give up yet.

I first thought that you were suggesting that the narrower usages of love and hate were used to refer to enitities with certain properties, the most obvious being the property of being human, but perhaps you could extend that (I won't). This kind of restriction I think I can work with a little more. Take a look at it in action.

(1) a. A man killed this child.
    b. A man murdered this child.
    c. A gun killed this child.
    d. *A gun murdered this child.

(In this area of linguistics, a * precedes a unit, usually a sentence, to indicate that the unit is ungrammatical, as determined by observation or formal definition or cause I said so.)

So why can guns kill but not murder? Well, it's slumped-over-weeping-with-head-in-hands complicated. Roughly, according to one theory, the entry in your mental lexicon for murder includes a restriction saying that only people can murder, so murder let's a phrase into the murderer role only if that phrase refers to an entity that has the property of being a person. (Note that this doesn't apply to rhetorical uses, which are presumably derived from the 'normal' uses.) I think this kind of restriction is much, much more consistently enforced than a 'restriction' like 'use love only in extreme cases'.

If love or hate did at some time place semantic selectional restrictions on the entities to which they can be applied (the object of the love or hate), I think there are things that you could expect to see since these restricitons are tied into the structure of phrases and all that other good, rule-following stuff. For example, you might expect to find certain words getting compounded with love and hate and NOT to find others. Well crack my skull call me nvtz, I think that's something like progress. I wonder when love started being used as a noun to refer to people. Hm, you might be able to get something resembling an answer to this after all. But I don't want to kill zooby's lovely thread, so let me know if anyone's interested.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I wonder how this informal use came to be? Other cultures make more distinction between these words. Maybe Honestrosewater knows.
-scott

There's no mystery. It's just hyperbole.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Pregnancy changed my tastes. I had never liked pine nuts and didn't care too much either way about mint, corriander, fresh basil and rocket. I began to like pine nuts in pregnancy and craved the others. I still crave the others and its been a while since I was pegnant.

This is very interesting. It implies that what tastes good to people is linked, not so much to the physical taste buds, but to the particular balance of hormones.

 

[zoobyshoe]

With music, I'll only switch from hate to love if the hate was ideological. It's common for musicians to write songs that give the exact opposite impression from what was intended (like "Born in the USA" or "Crash"), so this has happened to me before.

So the shift is a matter of appreciating the sardonic or sarcastic element of the lyrics?

With women, it's entirely different. I love to hate my girlfriends and sometimes the words are even synonymous. Hate can be really hot.

I think it's common when a man and woman fight a lot to suspect there's thwarted or inexpressible affection behind it.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

There has been music that I liked but then stopped liking because my taste in music changed/matured. Generally if I've decided that I dislike something it's because of something rather definite. I can't think of any time that I have changed my mind from disliking to liking.

---edit---
Actually there was a person on a forum (not this one) that I didn't like at first but came to like later on. The reason was that she had really annoyed me with the way she 'acted' until I got to know her better. I think that I had annoyed her too.

 

[Moonbear]

This is very interesting. It implies that what tastes good to people is linked, not so much to the physical taste buds, but to the particular balance of hormones.

I've never given it much thought as to how or why, but that observation makes sense to me. People's tastes seem to change a few times in life, and the times I've heard of those changes happening most often are in adolescence/young adulthood and pregnancy. For people who realize there are foods they hated as a kid, but then like as an adult, often it's just the first time they tried it since being a kid, so it's hard to nail down exactly when their tastes changed. It would be interesting if it was linked to puberty in some way. I'm talking about tastes with regard to food, though, not music.

I've encountered a few songs like that, where I've changed from not liking it at all to really enjoying it. I couldn't tell you why though. My best guess would be that since the particular types of music I like to listen to at any time depends on my mood, it could be that the first time I heard a song, I wasn't in the right mood to appreciate it, and when I heard it later, I was in a different mood and could appreciate it.

 

[Evo]

This is very interesting. It implies that what tastes good to people is linked, not so much to the physical taste buds, but to the particular balance of hormones.

I vomited for the first 5 months of pregnancy. The only thing I could keep down was salty baked ham. I couldn't stand the smell of anything.

 

[JasonRox]

I used to really hate pineapple. It was mostly because of its texture, it didn't feel like regular fruit to me. At one point i made myself eat a piece of pineapple as if it were a piece of fruit and not something weird. I thought to myself "this makes sense". And now i love pineapple.

Same thing happened to me with Cantalopes!

 

[SpaceTiger]

So the shift is a matter of appreciating the sardonic or sarcastic element of the lyrics?

Absolutely, I love songs that mock the mundane.

 

[zoobyshoe]

So, we have a certain small indication that flips in musical taste are a matter of finally paying full attention to a particular song, and that flips in food taste may be related to physical changes in the person.

 

[SpaceTiger]

So, we have a certain small indication that flips in musical taste are a matter of finally paying full attention to a particular song

Not even, it's all about interpretation. People take from music what they bring to it. If they don't know the author's intention, the song can have a unique, personal meaning, regardless of how carefully they listen. There's nothing wrong with interpreting "Crash" or "Every Breath You Take" as love songs, but I think the songs are made much cooler by the fact that they were written about stalkers.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Not even, it's all about interpretation. People take from music what they bring to it. If they don't know the author's intention, the song can have a unique, personal meaning, regardless of how carefully they listen. There's nothing wrong with interpreting "Crash" or "Every Breath You Take" as love songs, but I think the songs are made much cooler by the fact that they were written about stalkers.

Even. I'm not asking what causes you to like a song, but what causes a flip from hate to love. Your story and the one I related give two small indications this flip is precipitated by listening more closely.

 

[AngelShare]

I did like ham when i was a kid, but now the smell of a boiling ham joint
makes me feel ill, i have no memory of what triggered this change.
the same with beef dripping, i used to love it spread on bread, but now the
thought of it makes me queezey.
whereas, the thought of eating blue cheese was repugnant, but now after trying it some years ago i love it.

I used to like Steakums (Is that the correct term? It just now occurred to me that that's a rather odd word...:rofl: ) but now they disgust me...the grease dripping off the grill and dropping into the little container at the bottom...it cooling and then hardening into white, goofy, yucky...bleh... Aw, I think I'm making myself sick...:yuck:

I can't think of anything I used to hate that I like now...usually, I go from liking something to hating something, not the other way around. More examples...

7th Heaven
Full House

Oh, now I got one...Seinfeld...and, oh, Sex and the City. I didn't really like either of them but now I like Seinfeld and absolutely love Sex and the City.

 

[AngelShare]

Even. I'm not asking what causes you to like a song, but what causes a flip from hate to love. Your story and the one I related give two small indications this flip is precipitated by listening more closely.

I can't think of any songs that I hated and then loved but there have been times when I was indifferent to a song and then grew to like it. Sometimes it was because I heard it over and over and over again...others because my mood changed...and other times it was because, before, I had never really listened to it.

 

[SpaceTiger]

Even. I'm not asking what causes you to like a song, but what causes a flip from hate to love. Your story and the one I related give two small indications this flip is precipitated by listening more closely.

It is my story, so I think I would know why I changed my mind.

 

[DocToxyn]

Apparently genetics can drive taste preference (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed" .

Food preference is such a complicated issue since it comes along with visual and olfactory stimuli. My wife had food issues during pregnancy, coffee brewing "smelled worse than skunk" and caused here to have to leave the room. Prior to pregnancy and after she is an avid coffee drinker. There are also many reports of "pika" or comsumption of non-food items like dirt during pregnancy, logically linked to drastically altered hormonal systems and the like. I don't think her taste in music changed though. That came later since now all we listen to is "The Wiggles" and Playhouse Disney.

 

[Gale]

my musical tastes can change a lot, but mostly its because of how i listen to it. once i learned guitar it was hard to enjoy certain types of music. when i was depressed i really liked emo stuff, but now that I'm not, i can't stand their whining.

with foods, I've tried changing my tastes, but i can't tend to do it willingly. most things I've hated since childhood, i still hate.. peanut butter, carrots, (and most veggies,) spaghetti and plenty more... there's a few things i'll eat now that i didn't used to, like lettuce and spinach and french fries, but that's because i learned that i didn't like ranch dressing or ketchup.

There's been people i sometimes like or don't like depending on my mood. that's definitely a mood thing though. sometimes around friends, i'll think that even though they're dense and not exactly smart, I'm like "whatever, they're fun to be around" and other times i just can't stand the stupid things they like to do.

 

[zoobyshoe]

It is my story, so I think I would know why I changed my mind.

So, you're saying instead of hearing the alternate interpretation by listening more closely you underwent some sort of stupification that made you listen less closely?

 

[SpaceTiger]

So, you're saying instead of hearing the alternate interpretation by listening more closely you underwent some sort of stupification that made you listen less closely?

I changed my mind because I was told what the songwriter's intentions were. The whole point here is that I then approached the song from a completely different perspective. This certainly can happen by listening more closely to a song, but it doesn't have to and it didn't in the case I was describing.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Okay, here is a really strange one. When I was about age ten I got a really bad case of the flu. After being deathly ill for several days I had just started to feel better, mom was cooking dinner, and I was finally ready to eat something [smelling dinner] when I saw this commercial that showed someone frying chopped onions. For some reason the chopped onions looked to me like chopped pickels which I instantly began to crave. Before this I would eat pickles but didn't particularly like them more than other veggies, but from that time on I loved pickles.

Even then this all seemed very odd, but I think it was a response to not eating for several days.

 

[hypnagogue]

See also the mere exposure effect. It seems that in some cases, we develop preferences for things just as a function of how much we've been exposed to them, whether consciously or unconsciously. On a somewhat related note, people's introspective explanations for why they've developed a preference for some thing or another don't necessarily faithfully track the true causes.