Words I Love

For most people, this is not a hard word to love. Everybody loves sex, except for nuns, virgins, Mormons, and guys with very very small penises and the women who pretend to love them. But I love the word itself, not just its meaning. I love it because you take this complicated act, this act that dominates so much of our thinking, an activity that creates new worlds and destroys others, and you reduce it until you have a one syllable, three letter word. And not just any three letter word. It’s got the most common letter of all (“E”), the third most common consonant, letters everyone loves and is familiar with, and then you toss in that dirty little “X”. The S and the E would be NOTHING without that enticing X at the end. We love the X. It’s a filthy, slutty whore of a letter and it’s tag-teaming that innocent lowercase E. X isn’t just wrong, it’s even the symbol for “wrong” or “do not do”. That makes me hard.

Interesting “fact” about this word: D.H. Lawrence invented it. I’m pretty sure he also started the company DHL.