It’s obvious (of course), but somehow I hadn’t realised until recently that not only is value a noun whose meaning changes dramatically when it becomes plural, but it is also conveys yet another meaning when used as a verb.
I find that I much prefer to think of value as a verb - ‘do you value this product?’ rather than ‘what is the value of this product?’. As a verb the word ‘value’ connotes a positive emotional response to a product with very little relation to the price or cost of that product. Thus we seem to have
- value (n. singular): the price that someone is willing to pay for a product. This is a property of the product itself, as assessed by a person (= economic value to wikipedia)
- values (n. plural): important human / societal qualities embedded in a product, or beliefs possessed by a person (= personal and cultural values on wikipedia).
- value (verb): to believe or feel that an object is desirable (= value theory according to wikipedia)
But then, even worse, maybe companies use ‘value’ to mean ‘cheap’, which is a migration into ‘value’ as an adjective! Closer inspection has revealed that the adjectival form does not always mean cheap (for example, the University of Pennsylvania define ‘value PCs’ as cost-effective and designed to last three years.
The element I find difficult here is that ‘value’ as an adjective nearly always seems to suggest a product that few people deeply value! And it certainly doesn’t suggest a product that embodies any important human values.
It would be great to get a perspective from a non-English speaker - there seem to be at least four distinct concepts of ‘value’ here and presumably some languages handle the differences better than we do in English?
David Gilmore