While I am wholly in favour of everyone finding their perfect love partner and they being officially identified and treated as a committed ‘pair’, I find the rush to change the true meaning of established words disturbing.

The fall of man, an oil painting by Hendrick Goltzius. Photo: Shutterstock

One of my dictionaries states that the meaning of marriage is the “state of being husband and wife or the mutual relation it represents”.

The Oxford English Dictionary is an enormous work in many volumes detailing the precise meaning of innumerable words. There are so many words in this wonderful and comprehensive dictionary only because, legally or socially, we often require a separate specific word to accurately describe each particular thing or situation. Though the word marriage should continue to match the accepted dictionary definition, we clearly need lovely new words to describe new full and committed partnership situations that really should have been recognised long ago.

I accept that it might be difficult to coin inclusive new words for the various possible love partnerships that will initially be without stigma but we surely should not repeat the understandable but unfortunate ‘shanghaiing’ of a perfectly wonderful and precise word as happened with the word gay.

Both from a legal and a linguistic standpoint, we should maintain the current dictionary meaning of the word “marriage”.