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Red hearts on Valentine's Day |
 February 14th - Valentine's Day. The day when haggard-looking men rush panic-stricken to the card-shop, to rifle through the sorry collection of remaining greetings cards, in the vain hope of averting the wrath of their Loved One with a hugely expensive, tackily decorated piece of card containing a trite message carefully and lovingly crafted for the love of your life... by a complete stranger. In Taiwan.
Ahh, Valentine's Day... You can find all about the hapless Mr.
Valentine and the romance-fest his selfless act spawned elsewhere. But
what interests us here is, naturally, what's all this stuff about red hearts?!
The red heart
It is only since the 13th century, thanks to the work of pioneering Arabian physician, Ibn Al-Nafis that we have any idea that the heart has something to do with blood circulation. And this idea took a few centuries more before it was accepted in Europe. Before then, the heart was believed to be the seat of the emotions, and the idea still persists in phrases like "home is where the heart is" and many others. So it is not surprising that the heart has remained a symbol of love to this very day.
The funny doubled-up symbol we have is probably basically a stylised image of what the human heart does actually look like, with its two ventricles.
And why is it red? Well, we can only assume that it's something to do with the actual color of the heart, and the considerable quantities of that runny red stuff that sloshes around in the body, and seems to be particularly prolific around the heart.
So the color of red in romance is a little suspect - it demonstrates that the romantic notion of love is actually a pretty gory business, which is what we knew all along...
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