Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Fine Shades of Meaning, Out the Wazoo

I find the word exotic to be titillating. The word titillating, however, is merely vulgar. This could be because it includes the word tit, without, however, coming right out and saying tit. Coming right out and saying tit, I find provocative - but not suggestive! It's gone a good bit beyond being merely suggestive at that point. Provocative can be arousing, or it can be inflammatory. Either one could be controversial, depending on context - yet I think you'll find that something inflammatory is usually not arousing, especially if it is inflammatory in the nature of an irritant: causing the skin to get red. Even as an indecent remark can cause the skin to get red! A blush of demure mortification, a flush of embarrassment - which some find alluring.

Words are mysterious and tantalizing messengers. They tease us capriciously with meaning, hinting at the bare outlines of thought, letting diaphanous accents settle over and enwrap thought's succulent frame, caressing its sleek surface; and sometimes - sometimes! - stripping away every last veil from thought's glorious stark figure, the full reveal in a shocked instant, with a sudden flash of insight and a bawdy flourish of trombone! Words entrance and entice; the ways in which they work wantonly upon our minds and moods can be maddeningly sensuous, galvanically transcendent, and volcanically intense. Today, I adulate conversation. Today, I sing the virtues of words.

Stimulating conversation - can there be a more pleasurable leisure activity? A more gratifying way to satiate the need one has, to know another more deeply, most fully? A surer way to probe and reach even the inmost inward secret depths of another, to assuage our fervid desire to be as completely one with another as two can be? Or three! The presence of a third is no bar to shared intimacies, so long as trust is there. Indeed, in all our fond and tender relations with one another, should we not strive to expose ourselves, as much and as often as possible? And to be open and receptive to others, as they in turn dare their own exposures!

To really converse with another is a bold and brazen act of daring, an audacious act. A courageous act. But at that moment when we truly meet each other in our deepest regions, when we see and feel and embody the startling fact that we know each other, know each other well, very well, oh! so well, and very thoroughly - in that one ecstatic instant, that rapture of knowing and being known, fully - we see that every risk on the way was worth taking. We see that the true folly would have been to withdraw, short of the mark, or to have never made the risky attempt. For it is then, in that heady rush of sympathetic bliss, the fulfillment of that moment, of thought offered, of point taken, of thrust grasped, of comprehension clenched and meaning held tight, of nuance wrung and subtlety bled dry, and a wide shared smile as you each luxuriate in the lingering enjoyment of that sublime consummation of intent and realization, flung back upon a freshly disheveled and mingled perspective, basking, awash in the thrum and glow of a mutually-reached understanding - it is then that truly, we must admit conversation to be the pinnacle of human intercourse.

Hm. Now, about that post title - is it properly "out the wazoo," or "up the wazoo"?

A loaded question. Perhaps.

2 comments:

Sean Scully said...

I had some reporter friends on Capitol Hill who had a standing challenge - to get the word "moist" into a story about the budget. I am told one of them succeeded, though I have not seen the result.

Moist is not a nice word.

dogimo said...

That doesn't seem like it'd be too hard.

I know you consider Monty Python to be the nadir of puerile laddishness, but there is a really very droll and verbally acrobatic monologue Eric Idle performs in a skit where he's a newsreader reporting on the stock market - quite moist and most amusing!

HEY WAIT!~

Moist is a wonderful word!

Damp is a not nice word.