A Lover's Lexicon

The author presents thirty newly-coined words from her personal "lover's lexicon" and invites the reader to borrow them; to use them as a source of inspiration; to allow them to serve as examples for reader-created words reflective of a more richly differentiated sexual seeking and experiencing in the reader's life.

The personal love story told between these pages has a teaching purpose: to demonstrate that expanding one's sexual intimacy vocabulary extends one's consciousness of sexual intimacy possibilities and leads to greatly-enriched experiences.

Years ago I read somewhere --in a novel I think it was --that the Eskimos have thirty words for snow. Thirty words were necessary to adequately describe their vital and richly-nuanced relationship with snow. At the time I was working on a radio script with a sexual intimacy theme, and I was struck by how limited (in the English language) our sexual intimacy vocabulary is. "Fucking" and "screwing" are harsh words; "intercourse" is bland; "coitus" is silly sounding. Common colloquialisms, while often colorful, tend to be one-dimensional. And the phrase "making love" has been stretched tissue-thin to include activities that are neither generative nor loving. I was intrigued by the idea of creating richly-nuanced words that would inspire and reflect richly-nuanced possibilities in the vitally important realm of sexual intimacy. As an initial step in that direction, I purchased a journal dedicated to what I conceived of as "a lover's lexicon" and set a goal of thirty words. The pages of that journal remained empty for months. Attempting to mine my three lapsed love affairs for potential journal entries yielded little inspiration. Then along came R. and those pages began to fill up. Through my relationship with R., my consciousness of sexual intimacy possibilities became profusely differentiated--sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in ways that startled and shook my imagination. That story is told within these pages as a series of thirty vignettes.