Ever been in one of those lovers' quarrels where you fight over what he said or she said or how it was said?

 She says, "You're insensitive," and he says, "Whaddya mean, insensitive? You're overbearing." And she says, "Whaddya mean, overbearing?" And on and on.

And all along, what they are really are fighting about is that the relationship is over and they both want the dog.

A current lawsuit over landmark preservation is like that, though there never has been any love lost between the two sides.

The fight between Chicago and two plaintiffs looks like it's about words or semantics, but it is really about the value of our city's history, or neighborhood charm versus teardowns, or property rights, or money -- or all of the above.

Unfortunately, their quarrel doesn't just affect one or two properties; it has the potential to rip apart decades of preservation legislation all over the country.

A couple of years ago, Albert Hanna and Carol Mrowka (who both make their living in real estate) started the lawsuit together when each of their aldermen got landmark designations for their respective neighborhoods: the Arlington Deming District in Lincoln Park and the East Village District. In both cases, most of their neighbors were anxious to prevent teardown-rebuilds that threatened to change the character of the neighborhoods.

When a neighborhood is landmarked, it makes it more difficult for investors who want to make a profit by tearing down an old house and rebuilding a big, new, out-of-character house or a multi-unit condo building.

Opponents also say it takes away an owner's right to do whatever he wants with his property. Landmarking can also cost homeowners money if it creates restrictions on how they make repairs or add on to their house.

The lawsuit claims that the 41-year-old Chicago ordinance is vaguely worded, and that decisions about buildings and neighborhoods should not be made based on words like "important" or "significant."

Unfortunately for preservation efforts, earlier this year the Illinois Appellate Court ruled against the ordinance, and then last week the state Supreme Court refused to hear the case. But, like any good lawsuit, it's not going to be over for a while.

Preservationists for the city and other groups insist the words in question are standard terms used everywhere.

"Chicago's ordinance is fairly state of the art," said Jim Peters, president of Landmarks Illinois, a preservation advocacy group based in Chicago. "That's why we are getting so much concern from around the nation."

Probably three quarters of the nation's cities use a similar ordinance, he said, and in all those places, a generalized ordinance makes it possible to write a separate ordinance for every landmark.

Though the umbrella ordinance is general, each individualized ordinance is very specific, with lots of detail about what is "important" or "significant."

In Chicago, each specific landmark ordinance is voted on by City Council, which has the option of deciding whether or not the landmark is truly important or significant enough to be designated as a landmark.

It doesn't take a marriage counselor to see that this lawsuit is not about the meaning of words.

It's a much bigger issue, one that is at the heart of almost every left-right argument you find in millennium America. It's the rancorous fight over individual rights versus community rights; between the right of an individual to his property and the profits from it versus the rights of a community that thrives or suffers as a result of the individual decisions of its members.

It's too bad that the Appellate Court fell for the distraction of arguing over word definitions that any relationship counselor could have seen through.

Let the argument dissolve into petty word games and in the end you have only hurt the children.