There's a line in the remix of Lil Wayne's grossly underplayed (just kidding) "Lollipop" that never fails to floor me: "Safe sex is great sex / better wear a latex / 'cause you don't want that late text, that 'I think I'm late' text."


Simple, yes, but genius. He didn't just rhyme here; he took a word, sawed it in two and worked it out so that it rhymed with a mutilated version of itself. Kink redefined. The title of this post might suggest that I was planning to delve into the multitude of arenas in which language can heighten bedroom activity (most relevantly, foreplay), but nah. This is just an ode to language. I fucking love language. I love fucking with language, and I do so on the regs. And people who know how to do the same are generally the people I like to fuck. I'm sprung on words and songs and poems and ideas that sidestep cliche like it's the plague and then two-step innovation into the greener fields of your imagination. So, it comes (pun intended), full circle.

My friend Lucy is a writers' groupie. Put someone like the aforementioned Mr. Carter or David Beckham or A-Rod in front of her face, and she'd probably walk away. But if the dude had ever written a novel, been published in The New Republic or was a staff writer at the Times, she'd gladly accept their dick in an orifice or two. And she has! Now, not everyone I know who's engaged in a crazy love affair with words expresses their love in a peripheral fashion. I mean, I don't. But I do get it. Words are the most liberating things in the world. And a dime-store analysis of groupie mentality is that fucking a person who's capitalized on their slickness with words could result in having the liberty that their talent affords them rub off on you. Or in you. Ew. Whatever.

My friend Sophia is 22 years old, but I always tease her because she speaks like an 102-year-old man. If she's kvetching about her landlord, for instance, she'll explode with something like, "You know what? He's a real pill!" Another one of her faves? Telling me to quit "sassing" her. Moreover, referring to any outspoken female as "sassy." My friend Jo, a supremely-gifted wordsmith M.C. (and half of Chicago's hip hop duo Filf Dos), has been known to refer to herself as "impecunious" (poor). She uses words like "bicker" like they're going out of style. I'm all about the retro-appeal of "Jeez Louise" and "for Pete's sake!" Will Ferrell fucked with the tenor of these old-fashioned constructions in Anchorman, spewing nonsensicalities with such fervor and conviction that we bought them, time and again ("By the beard of Zeus!"). If antiquated and rarely used language was a woman, by now I'd have found a way to bag some progressive technologies and procreate with her like whoa. Our offspring would be the sunshine of our love.

Then there's always the tactic employed by personal heroes like Snoop and Mary J. Blige, who, like other pioneers, simply create words when they need to make a verse rhyme (or, in Snoop's case, whenever he feels like it).


Kanye gets big ups for making Klondike rhyme with blonde dyke (mostly just cause I am one). Michael Cirelli, a poet and teacher friend of mine, won my respect for life with the ironically incisive line in one of his poems: "I am the white Eminem." Oscar Wilde said he could resist everything but temptation, and I cherish him for it. In one of his lesser-known songs, "Sara," Bob Dylan describes his lover as "a scorpio sphinx in a calico dress," a sexy and complicated depiction so haunting and good it's been hardwired into my brain since the first time I heard it.

I love my dad for trying to open a joint called "The Soup Jew" in the aftermath of the Seinfeld Soup Nazi epidemic. I love my uncle for always telling me that I have "a keen sense of the obvious." And I love this riddle book I scored in L.A., which informed me that two words in the English language that don't rhyme with anything are "orange" and "month." It's true. There aren't any that do. At all. I racked my arguably well-endowed brain and came up with nothing. Try for yourself.

It's the visceral thrill you get from pronouncing words like "coalesce" and "cumberbun." How they feel like liquid ecstasy in your mouth. It's the phrases that ideologically get you going, "like white on rice," and any number of 'yo mama' jokes. It's these things that make me happy, that habitually brighten me up like a light bulb, cocked behind my cartoon head like a good idea.