• The words emotive and emotional share similarities but are not simply interchangeable. Emotive is used to mean‘arousing intense feeling’, while emotional tends to mean‘characterized by intense feeling’. Thus an emotive issueis one which is likely to arouse people’s passions, while an emotional response is one which is itself full ofpassion. In sentences such as we took our emotivefarewells the word emotive has been used in a contextwhere emotional would be more appropriate