Why Love Means Nothing

Every few months someone asks me to speak at their event “for love”. They usually add that there’ll be great exposure. I always say thank you, because I know exactly what they’re offering, and so does every tennis umpire on the planet.

Love is zero. Fifteen–love, thirty–love, a love game. Tennis is the one place where love is officially worth nothing, and the umpire reads it out to a stadium full of people.

The story you’re most likely to hear is that it’s French. A zero looks like an egg, the French for egg is l’œuf, and English speakers who couldn’t manage the vowel said “love” instead. It’s a lovely story with a cartoon built in. Unfortunately, nobody has found any evidence for it. There’s no record of French players calling zero “the egg”, and in French tennis it’s zéro. The egg theory seems to have been made up afterwards by people who wanted the answer to be cuter than it is.

The real answer is less cute and much more useful.

From the 1670s, English speakers talked about playing a game “for love”. That meant playing for no stakes. Nobody had money on it. You were playing for the fun of it, which meant you were playing for nothing. By the 1740s, “love” had moved from the stake to the scoreboard, and it meant no score. If you’d played for love, there was nothing riding on the game. If you had love, there was nothing next to your name.

So love didn’t come to mean nothing by accident. It meant “not for money”, and English quietly worked out that anything not done for money is worth zero.

The same idea is hiding in another word. Amateur comes, via French, from Latin amator, a lover, which comes from amare, to love. An amateur is someone who does a thing because they love it. We now use the word to mean someone who isn’t very good at it. That’s the same downgrade again. Love goes in and “less than professional” comes out.

We still say we’d do something “for love or money”. It sounds like a choice between two currencies. Tennis settled that argument centuries ago. One of them counts and the other one is zero.

I don’t think that’s a reason to stop doing things for love. Most of the best work anyone does starts there. But it’s a good reason to listen carefully when somebody offers you love as payment. In the original rules, love meant you weren’t getting paid, and it meant you hadn’t scored.

So the next time a request lands with “we were hoping you might do it for love”, you’ll know the score.