Ruidoso on Valentine's Day!

Take a romantic journey: Valentine's Day in the wondrous mountains of Ruidoso. The ambience of romanticism abounds in the cool pine-ladened forests of Ruidoso...bring your loved one to our mountain community and rekindle your love in the wilderness of the high Southern Rockies...discover the pathway back to your loved one's heart through discovered remembrances of newly created timeless memories...visit our many specialized gift shops with boundless romantic offerings, experience dining in intimate mountain air settings, electrifying casinos will keep you entertained well into the late hours...and, to write your romantic journey with indelible ink, stay in a mountain cabin, a luxury condo, or an atmospheric lodge...we'll provide the fireplace and wine glasses...bring your poems of love. Timeless remembrances can never be recreated in a more romantic setting than in the wondrous mountains of Ruidoso.

The History of Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day has been celebrated for many centuries. Even though Valentine's Day falls on February 14, the feast day of certain Christian martyrs named Valentine (third century A.D.), its customs probably began with the Roman Feast of Lupercalia, which was celebrated on February 15. On the eve of Saint Valentine's Day, young people would gather, and each young man would draw by lot a young lady's name. The couples were then "valentines" for the year and would exchange tokens of love.

Early in the 1800's valentine cards, exchanged as messages of love, became popular. Soon a large business developed in cards and gifts, such as candy and flowers.

The "Penny" Postcard

The Valentine images displayed on this page are reproduced from "penny" postcards, which were popular from about 1890 to 1917. They were called penny postcards because they were mailed with a one-penny postage stamp. It was very "proper" during this time (1890 to 1917) to collect and display your collection of postcards (and trade cards) in the parlor. Friends and guests would often sit for hours, leafing through the album while they visited. The penny postcard became so popular during this era that photographers, studios, printers, and business were constantly searching for new and exciting subjects to satisfy an audience that was hungry for new ideas to impress their friend at home. To make their cards stand out, people often sought out real photographic postcards. Instead of mass-produced lithographs, these were actual photographs made with a postcard printed back. The photography studios often employed women to hand tint and color the black & white photo postcards. Some of the best photo postcards came from Germany, which was also famous for its detailed and colorful lithography. Popular subjects for these photo postcards were women, children, flowers, and young lovers, posed and arranged in an effort to portray the idealized virtues of the Victorian Era.

Twas simpler time when you didn't need a Zip Code to mail a post card --or even a house number for that matter!

Here's some inspiration on writing your letters of romanticism:

Love letter in the form of a sonnet from the Portuguese, XIV (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806-1861)

If thou must love me, let it be for nought Except for love's sake only. Do not say 'I love her for her smile--her look--her way Of speaking gently,--for a trick of thought That falls in well with mine, and certes brought A sense of pleasant ease on such a day For these things in themselves, Beloved, may Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought, May be unwrought so. Neither love me for Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry, A creature might forget to weep, who bore Thy comfort long, and lose thy love, thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

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Swaying words of romance...avoid the cliches by using some "fresh" terms:

Merriam-Webster's Romance Language

In all deference to Alfred Lord Tennyson, often our fancy "lightly turns to thoughts of love" long before the arrival of Spring—especially during February as we celebrate the feast day of St. Valentine, the patron of lovers. We'd like to think that includes word-lovers, so we're giving Cupid a little lexicographical help this month. By faithfully culling through the archives of Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day, we've concocted a potion of ten alluring words and phrases having to do with affairs of the heart—complete with the "love story" behind each term.

amative  \AM-uh-tiv\  adjective
1 : strongly moved by love and especially sexual love
2 a : indicative of love b : of or relating to love

The Story Behind the Word
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . ." Elizabeth Barrett Browning came up with eight ways to express her love in her poem; we offer six ways, or rather six words, to describe those expressions of love. Besides the familiar "amorous" and today's "amative," there's "amatory," "amoristic," "amatorious," and "amatorial" (you have to go to our unabridged dictionary to look up those last two). What we love about this list is that all the words stem from Latin "amare," meaning "to love." "Amative," which was first introduced in 1636, was modeled on Medieval Latin "amativus," from the past participle of "amare." "Amorous," on the other hand, goes back to Middle English and came from Medieval Latin "amorosus," an adjective based on the noun "amor" ("love").

besot   \bih-SAHT\  verb
1 : infatuate
2 : to make dull or stupid; especially : to muddle with drunkenness

The Story Behind the Word
Does the very sight of your darling leave you drunk with love this February? Consider yourself besotted. Our modern word "besot" developed from a combination of the prefix "be-" and "sot," a now obsolete word meaning "a habitual drunkard." "Sot" in turn comes from the Old English "sott," which was used as a noun meaning "fool" or "drunkard" and as a verb meaning "to stupefy." In its "infatuation" sense, "besot" is most often turned into a participial adjective, a role it is likely to play in literary musings on "besotted lovers." The first known use of "besotted" was in Sir Thomas North's 1580 translation of Plutarch's Lives, in which Antonius was described as "besotted by Cleopatra."

billet-doux  \bill-ee-DOO\  noun
: a love letter

The Story Behind the Word
The first recorded use of the French word "billet-doux" (literally, "sweet letter") in an English context occurs in John Dryden's 1673 play Marriage a-la-Mode. In the play, Dryden pokes fun at linguistic Francophiles in English society through the comic character Melanthe, who is described by her prospective lover Rodophil as follows: "No lady can be so curious of a new fashion as she is of a new French word; she's the very mint of the nation, and as fast as any bullion comes out of France, coins it immediately into our language." True to form, Melanthe describes Rodophil with the following words: "Let me die, but he's a fine man; he sings and dances en Francais and writes billets-doux to a miracle."

coquetry  \KOH-kuh-tree\  noun
: a flirtatious act or attitude

The Story Behind the Word
The rooster's cocky attitude has given him a reputation for arrogance and promiscuity. It has also given English several terms for people whose behavior is reminiscent of that strutting barnyard fowl. Both "coquetry" and "coquet" trace to diminutive forms of "coq," the French word for "rooster." Although "coquet" and "coquetry" are now often associated with females, when they first appeared in English in the 1600s, they were more likely to be used to describe men who indulged in trifling flirtations. "Coquette," the French feminine form, was preferred for flirtatious women, but over time English speakers blurred those gender lines and "coquet" is now used as a noun, adjective, or verb for frivolous, playful, or insincere lovers of either sex.

Cupid  \KYOO-pid\  noun
1 : the Roman god of love
2 not capitalized: a figure that represents Cupid as a naked usually winged boy often holding a bow and arrow

The Story Behind the Word
According to Roman mythology, Cupid was the son of Mercury, the messenger god, and Venus, the goddess of love. In Roman times, the winged "messenger of love" was often depicted in armor, but no one is sure if that was intended as a sarcastic comment on the similarities between warfare and romance, or a reminder that love conquers all. The Romans sometimes saw Cupid as mischievous and careless, but in general he was seen as a good spirit who brought happiness to all.

lapidary   \LAP-uh-dair-ee\  noun
1 : a cutter, polisher, or engraver of precious stones usually other than diamonds
2 : the art of cutting gems

The Story Behind the Word
The Latin word for "stone" is "lapis"; in that language, something "of or relating to stone" is described as "lapidarius." Gem cutters obviously relate well to stone, and during the 14th century someone decided that "lapidarius" should be related to them. The spelling of the term was modified and it was borrowed into English as a name for both gem cutters and their art. Since the 1700s, "lapidary" has also been used as an adjective referring either to things having the elegance and precision of inscriptions carved on stone monuments or to things relating to the art of gem cutting.

lothario  \loh-THAIR-ee-oh\  noun
: a man whose chief interest is seducing women

The Story Behind the Word
"Lothario" comes from The Fair Penitent (1703), a tragedy by Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718). In the play, Lothario is a notorious seducer, extremely attractive but beneath his charming exterior a haughty and unfeeling scoundrel. He seduces Calista, an unfaithful wife and later the fair penitent of the title. After the play was published, the character of Lothario became a stock figure in English literature. For example, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) specifically modeled the character of Lovelace on Lothario in his 1748 novel Clarissa. As the character became well-known, his name became progressively more generic, and since the 18th century the word "lothario" has been used for a foppish, unscrupulous rake.

osculate  \AHSS-kyuh-layt\  verb
: kiss

The Story Behind the Word
"Osculate" comes from the Latin noun "osculum," meaning "kiss" or "little mouth." It was included in a dictionary of "hard" words in 1656, but we have no evidence that anyone actually used it until the 19th century (except for scientists who used it differently as a word for "contact"). Would any modern writer use "osculate"? Ben Macintyre did. In a May 2003 (London) Times piece entitled "Yes, It's True, I Kissed the Prime Minister's Wife," Macintyre wrote, "Assuming this must be someone I knew really quite well, I screeched 'How are you,' . . . and leant forward preparatory to giving her a chummy double-smacker . . . Perhaps being osculated by lunatics you have never seen before is one of the trials of being a Prime Minister's wife. She took it very well."

romance  \roh-MANSS\  noun
: a medieval tale based on legend, chivalric love and adventure, or the supernatural

The Story Behind the Word
In the last centuries of the Roman Empire the wide variety and the geographical distribution of the peoples recognized as Roman citizens led inevitably to the gradual change of the classical language of earlier days that we call Latin. These developing languages, which in their early, unrecorded stages were only local dialects of Latin, were designated romans (to use the Old French term cognate with other similar forms in Spanish, Italian, and the other languages that we still call romance languages today) to distinguish them from the formal and official language. Most serious literature, both prose and verse, continued to be written in Latin; but gradually the practice arose in France of writing entertaining verse tales in the more popular spoken language. Because many of these tales in both English and French, as well as in other languages, dealt with chivalric or courtly love, romance came to mean simply 'a love story' and eventually it developed the sense of 'a love affair.'

roué  \roo-AY\  noun
: a man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure: RAKE

The Story Behind the Word
The word roué can be traced back to the Latin noun rota, meaning 'wheel.' From the noun the verb rotare, 'to rotate,' was derived, which in Medieval Latin took on the sense 'to break on the wheel.' The wheel in question was the instrument of torture designed to extract a confession of guilt by stretching, disjointing, or otherwise mutilating the victim. Rotare became rouer in French, and roué is the past participle of that verb, meaning 'broken on the wheel.' About the year 1720 Philippe II, the Duke of Orleans and Regent of France, who was himself a profligate, called his wantonly licentious companions "roués," by which he meant that they deserved to be broken on the wheel. It has also been suggested that the duke may have called his friends roués because their debauches so exhausted them that they felt as though they had been broken on the wheel. In any case, roué then came to be applied to other such rakes and profligates, and its first appearance in English was around the year 1800.


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