Hate

Just like sin, hate is easy to sell.   Hate is intense dislike.  Hate is with us always.  In many ways hate is the opposite of “love.”

Forms of hate include but are not limited to racism, class warfare, ethnicity, religion, power, spousal, parental, climate, politics, beliefs, and anything contrary to one of the senses, e.g. smell, music.  Probably there are more.   What are your preferences?  Politicians of hate, often called demagogues, are everywhere at every time, in every place. For some, it is a career.

Hate is used frequently in our language.  In the database from the “Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English”  based on the 100,000,000 word electronic databank sampled from both spoken and written English  British National Corpus  at http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/bncfreq/flists.html  we obtain the work frequency analysis for nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other parts of speech.   We exclude articles of speech, pronouns, prepositions, and the like. 

Interesting points to consider, and you must be a true word geek to want to go further. :)

1. Nouns. There are about 3030 nouns that measure usage at the rate of at least ten per million.  The top two nouns are “time,” and “year.” They sum up to a frequency about 2%.  The top twenty nouns are time, year, people, way, man, day, thing, child, Mr, government, work, life, woman, system, case, part, group, number, world,  and house. This constitutes about 9% of all nouns used.  The bottom twenty are rehearsal, reluctance, residue, ribbon, scrap, semi-final, shilling, soviet, spelling, spider, stadium, toast, t-shirt, vegetation, velocity, voltage, waiter, waiting, wartime, and wheat.  They constitute about 0.11% of usage.  Remarkably, many of the bottom twenty begin with letters in the bottom register of the alphabet. 
2.  Nouns. Though “hate” is a verb, not a noun, few of the accepted hate-type or negative-type nouns, of which there are about 45, make few entries with these words.  Hate-type nouns include abhorrence,  abomination,  anathema,  animosity,  animus,  antagonism,  antipathy,  aversion,  black beast,  bother,  bugbear,  bête noire,  detestation,  disgust,  enmity,  execration,  frost,  grievance,  gripe,  hatred,  horror,  hostility,  ill will,  irritant,  loathing,  malevolence,  malignity,  mislike,  nasty look,  no love lost,  nuisance,  objection,  odium,  pain,  rancor,  rankling,  repugnance,  repulsion,  resentment,  revenge,  revulsion,  scorn,  spite,  and trouble.  Actually, only four of these are on the original list of nouns.  This implies they occur rarely.  I, for example, have never used “bugbear.”    I have used most of the others.  One of my early teachers once said I was repugnant to authority.  Despite the truth, is the negative, hateful,  or what?
3. Verbs. There are about 1113 verbs on this list.  The top twenty include be, have, do, will, say, would, can, get, make, go, see, know, take, could, think, come, give, look, may, and should.  A basic set, if I ever heard one.  As verbs, they occur about 55% of the time.  The bottom twenty include harm, indulge, inject, invade, invoke, level, nominate, obscure, offset, pledge, prohibit, roar, rob, rock, root, smooth, straighten, strive, swell, and venture. Collectively the bottom set occurs about 0.13% of the time.  “Hate” is number 405.  This means that of all the verbs used in this list the rate that “hate” occurs is #405, which translates to 50 uses  of every 100,000,000 words used. 
4.  Adjectives. There are 1035 adjectives on the list.  The top twenty-one include, in order of occurrence, other, good, new, old, great, high, small, different, large, local, social, important, long, young, national, British, right, early, possible, big, and little.  As adjectives, they occur about 20% of the time.  The bottom twenty include, in order of occurrence, puzzled, worldwide, handicapped, organizational, sunny, eldest, eventual, spontaneous, vivid, rude, nineteenth-century, faithful, ministerial, innovative, controlled, conceptual, unwilling, civic, meaningful, and disturbing.  These occur about 0.36% of the time.

As well, there are variations on the words, hate words, and hate language.  We could go on with adverbs and the like, but it is apparent that “hate” is a player in the game of words, an important though not a major one.  It is not without some significance, that the use of the words “hate” and “love has changed dramatically in the last two centuries.  More on this later.

Conclusion.  While hate and hate speech words are not exactly high on the list of word frequency counts, it is definitely there.  Is it wrong?  The un-blushed advocate would say any and all of these words are wrong but yet use them freely upon their opponents or detractors.   The simple fact is that hate and love are components of our personalities.  While we enjoy defeating and deprecating hate, we need it ourselves, if only to categorize thing we prefer or detest.  (See, another hate word.) Can we reduce “hate” to mere “dislike?”  Probably not.   We are a species of opposites, sometimes benignly in views but more often in activities.  If we love, then we may hate.  If we hate, then we may love.  Anyone who avoids the one at the expense of the other is considered a saint on the one hand or evil incarnate on the other.  

 To my mind love and hate form a balance in our lives.  Is it possible to know one without knowing the other?