Valence

My birthday is coming up, and for the first time in my adult life, I’m actually throwing a party.  A big party, where I’m inviting all my friends, all the people I like and hold dear.  At least all the ones who are in the NYC area and could reasonably attend.  This means getting everyone's emails...

I culled together my gmail acct, synced with my phone, and tried to get any remaining emails on fbook.   The total is somewhere around 130.  That sounds about right.  An article in The Times UK reports that evolutionary anthropologists studied the number of meaningful relationships humans can have.  ‘Dunbar’s Number’ describes this theory, and sets it at about 150 people. (Who am I leaving out!?)

The number of bonds an atom has, or can form, with other atoms is referred to as its valence.  In linguistics, they appropriated the term from chemistry to attribute the number of arguments a verb can have.  Because the term is so useful, linguists delineated between syntactic valency (as above), and semantic valency (the number thematic relations a verb can have).

Dunbar’s Number is just another way of describing ‘social valency.’  I like this word very much for its utility, and I use the word in this form, ‘valence of meaning.’  This construction allowed me to appreciate ambiguity in literature (and life).  I would often get frustrated that passages wouldn’t just say, this is this, or that is that.  I felt that because it was ambiguous, the lack of specificity meant I couldn’t interpret things any which way.  With ‘valences of meaning,’ it can have multiple interpretations at the same time.

Starting out as a scientific term, valence revealed itself to be a universal concept.  I think it’s fitting that its Latin root, valentia, means strength and capacity; both allow it to insert itself into new contexts.  It’s as though the meaning of the word contains itself, within itself.  Now, what’s the word for that?