"I know what this is / This is what we talk about / When we talk about love"

[cosmolinguist]

At work, there's a whiteboard on the wall. If it has any purpose but decoration, I haven't seen it. The date is usually there somewhere, as are some "inspirational" quotes or drawings or something. If a holiday is imminent there will probably be something about it. So, since Valentine's Day is approaching, I wasn't surprised to find "Love is..." written there with a column of numbers under it. Apparently a list was in progress; there were only two items so far but numbers up to seven.

I thought of my "what is love" collection. The first two things on the list were kind of lame; the first said "a gathering of friends," and the second was something about Grandma's cookies. I know I can't get away with saying anything I really like--such as "Love is a perky little elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun" (which was said by Matt Groening, which makes sense somehow; I guess that's the kind of thing I could see as animation). So I had to think a while and eventually remembered something that was still fairly irreverent.
I walked over to the whiteboard, picked up the blue marker, and wrote

"a grave mental disease." --Plato
(There was a little silly face next to it, though.)