Despite my answer to "Do you love or hate the concept of 'love it or hate it'?" being "Hate.", I still found this topic interesting enough to start this very thread. A couple of years ago my mum and some woman we had over one day started talking about cakes in my immediate vicinity and they came to the conclusion that you either love or hate cream cake. I voiced myself for the first time in a while and said something along the lines of "I disagree. I think cream cake is just fine, but nothing special." I still agree with this statement. I'd say cream cake is roughly between a relatively stale piece of buttered slices of bread with some perfectly adequate amount of some perfectly adequate cheese on top of it and a badly concocted fruit salad with loads of those misplaced pineapple chunks in it. Don't get me wrong, I kinda like both of those. I basically live off of them. And that's my point: cream cake is nothing special. It's not a "hamburger patty"-shaped blob of slightly fried deepwater fish in some horrible tomato sauce made in whatever nation is the farthest away from any part of Italy, but it's certainly not chocolate mousse, either, damnit. But enough of my jibber-jabber. Tastes vary, and I accept that ... in a way. ... Anyway, what do you love and hate that others feel the opposite about, feel "meh" about or hasn't heard of at all. I recently watched John Dies at the End for the first time, and I can't understand why anyone would think that movie is anything less than brilliant, despite me not being a fan of Paul Giamatti, not having heard of any of the other actors or actresses and hating horror and genre- and style mix-ups. And how do you feel about the saying "love it or hate it"? Is it ever true? So far in life my experiences have always pointed towards a strengthening of my core belief that "everything's a scale", meaning that every event, every object, every emotion is on a range from one extreme to another. Imagine dozens of huge tilted sliding scales in the room before you, like the volume on some electronic device, each at a different position. A 17% size of that chair to your left, the kitchen door barely ajar at 3%, 65% fire risk of that dangerously tall and carelessly positioned candle on the coffee table, an 82% heartbreak in the eyes of your girlfriend across the living room, a 1% chance of blizzard, that in turn has a 44% chance of causing at least one bit of snow or ice through the window that's 14% open to give you both some fresh air while you ponder about how come your girlfriend is devastated despite it being her who broke up with you, and you give her a 72% chance that she's faking it before proceeding to from your recollection give your relationship a score of 95%, which makes you 93% sad, i.e. 7%, AKA only barely any happier than you'd be if you were six feet under, and they you realise there's only about an 80% chance the moving company guys will get to you before the end of the week, and that makes you another 4‰ sad. You see all of these "scales" scattered around the room and think to your pretty little mind "Life is bloody complicated. Or is it "complex". Heck it's both. And that in itself is complex. And complicated. And bloody. Bloody bloody, in fact." Kinda like that, folks. Amirite or amirite? No hokum 'round this guy, oh no. This stuff is the top contender for for my eventual gravestone engraving. It'll say "HERE LIES BLAINE MUNDAY HE LIVED BY THE PRINCIPLE THAT EVERYTHING IS A SCALE, AND FOR THAT HE SHALL BE FOREVER REMEMBERED AND HONOURED REST IN PEACE, OLD FRIEND".
I have a reputation for being cynical and negative because I rarely say that I love something. My catchphrase is generally, 'it was alright.' People are too quick to use the words love and hate to describe anything they moderately like or dislike. Because of this overuse the words have pretty much lost their meaning. That's why I've chosen to use those words sparingly, and will only show my 'love' for something if it is exceptional. I will also only say I 'hate' something if I genuinely loathe it (or them) beyond any other practical measure. The idea of only loving or hating is absurd.
Thanks, @Selbbin , for commenting, and especially since you actually voiced a lot of my opinions very nicely. Also, NOTE: I'm somewhat astounded anyone managed to gather anything at all from the messy and enormous amount of text above. And, secondly, yes, I was kind of channeling, thank you for asking, some sort of "love it hate it" vibe with my post itself as well. Very meta, I know. And somehow I feel like I succeeded ...
It's a little harder to describe the nuances of something that is average overall than it is to be histrionic about how awesome or terrible it was.
I think that there can be some validity to "love it or hate it" for some things. I think that those things tend to be extremes. For example, a dish that is drowning in garlic, ten times the amount of garlic that any sane person would cook with, is likely to be loved by garlic fanatics and hated by others. Now, there's no guarantee of that--you can certainly have someone that has a high tolerance for garlic but doesn't really care about it one way or another. But I still think that people's feelings about that dish will tend toward the extreme, while their feelings about a perfectly nice dish with a normal modest amount of garlic will likely be more of an even spectrum. Drifting toward perfumes, as I so often do, I would say that extreme perfumes also tend to be of the love it or hate it variety...though there, I'm so fond of weird perfumes that I'm sort of like the guy with a high tolerance for garlic. It's rare for a perfume to be so weird that it repels me, so I'm in the position of being moderately fond of, for example, a perfume called Garage that smells of gasoline, grease, tires, kerosene and concrete floor. I like it, and was very pleased when I found a bottle after it was discontinued, but I'm not in love. It's not weird enough.
Perfume is an interesting example. Personally I think there might be some very basic human genetic instincts coming into play there. And also a close connection with what each individual person associates with each smell.
