MY EX
For you guys and girls, distinguished gentlemen and ladies or just losers scattered across the planet, for all of you who don’t use English mainly, this may not work quite as well. But you may not be reading my blog anyway. Fair enough?
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My Ex
Just four letterers make “My Ex”.
It only takes two words to describe the most antagonistic semantic combination: “My Ex”.
When we call something “mine”, that means we really have it, it’s even personal and we normally have some degree of control over it (him/her).
When we call something “ex”, that’s history! That thing or that person is not anymore bound to a relation that involves belonging to another thing or person.
If I say “my leg hurts a bit because I’ve just been partially run over by a train” you can almost feel it’s MY leg, as if it were yours. If you say “my elected member of the Parliament is corrupt” I may suspect you are from the other side, but I would still accept that the unnamed politician represents you, therefore you can call him “mine” (I mean “yours”, not mine). However, the relationship between you and your dodgy MP may not be as strong as mine normally is with my leg.
“My” is a very short word, which means it may be old. Many Indo-European languages have “my” and “mine” starting with an “m”, which confirms it’s really old, like a “root” type of word. “M” is also found in most languages as the starting sound for the word that signifies “mother” because the babies tend to start mumbling along the lines of “ma-ma-ma-ma” when their brain becomes a bit human after they had passed the rather nonsensical stage of “ga-ga-ga-ga” (when their brain is similar in capacity to a fully developed goose’s). It’s hard to find a world that has a root older than one relating directly to your mum and to the ancient idea of mother (except for my grandma who lived to 99 and only died because somebody told her she might have the flu).
But “ex” is a relatively new word. It has nothing to do with young children’s lingo. No baby I’ve ever met was going about his/hers growing business singing along: “la-la-la-ma-ma-ma-ga-ga-ga-ex-ex-ex”. I must say my experience with bringing up babies is fairly limited (to just a few) and my true impact in their upbringing could be subject to further questions I would prefer to ask though my lawyer. Anyway, “ex” seems to be a Roman invention. The Romans did not invent much, but they were the masters of letting everybody know what other folk had invented. It was going like that:
Stage 1:
General, look! There’s a country over there.
Can’t you see I’m bloody busy polishing my hooves? Toe nails, I mean –
But, Sir, with all due respect, there’s country or something that looks like a country over there and it’s not on our map!
Soldier, shall I count to ten starting nine soldiers before you or should I just decimate you?
But – General –
(Splash)
Stage 2:
Lucius Pula, my beloved friend and companion, that fool deserved it. We’ll raise him a statue, won’t we? I mean, we’ll put his name on the list for fundraising when it comes to statues, won’t we? Just check on that new country and see what kind of inventions they have over there before we stage a siege or just crush them, like we did to the other ones. Send the news to Rome first, ’cause it’s taking longer to get the word to the Senate that it takes me to conquer this village and call it a province. Would you?
Stage 3: Coronation
Stage 4:
(Same legion, a bit older, new general)
Soldier!
Sir!
What was that country the Emperor conquered?
Which one, Sir: the really big one, the smaller but longer one with curvy conquests along the streets, or the one with the highest number of inventions?
The – errr – the whatever one!
That was Inventia Caesarea, My General! (note: this soldier uses “MY” for his general but only as long as his head sits on his shoulders)
Attack! Civilize these barbarians with the inventions we got from the other ones and send the slimmest courier on the fastest horse to Rome. (apart, to the henchman:) Get the gallows ready. What a nice invention! This soldier knows far too much.
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For the Romans EX was greatly important. Imagine: “EX PATRIA MVNDO”.
Later, on barbarian turf ex-colonised by the Romans, EX started to be not necessarily a positive thing, but great, nevertheless. Imagine “EXCALIBVR”.
In modern times, EX is still powerful and respectable, although it may have lost some of its original meaning. Don’t imagine. Just search Google. Expedia comes up first. Guess how much they pay for that! And they have nothing to do with the real meaning of EX, which is OUT OF.
Have you ever wondered why every single time you are kissing your lover and the cinema theatre catches on fire and all panic and die but you are the only survivor? (Not to mention you might have to change partner every time a new movie comes to town.) The answer is near: you are the only one who can read Latin (that’s the language the Romans used, though to add to the confusion all the other newer baby-languages that derived from Latin are called Romance and not Latin languages and some have nothing to do with romance at all). If you read Latin and if you are not heavily colour blind, you can see in the dark a little green lamp labelled EXIT. This means: ex (out) [from] it (the cinema). This is how the Romans saved many lives, including yours (several times, mainly when you were out with that fat one you hooked up with at McDonalds when you initially were with the one who did not like pink and dumped you after that pool game) and if they carry on like that they may oversave the amounts of people they overkilled in their rush not to conquer the World (a World as large as the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum) just to spread the inventions across.
You know, EX, though much neglected and perhaps less used than MY, is still a mighty word.
Hudson, we have a problem!
When these two strong words collide, we get cataclysmic results: My Ex. If I were to dictate over the whole of the English language, including the realm of computer storage devices and Internet shared files, the only real power I would like to master is the one that gives people (and robots, in the near future) the chance to not use this most powerful oxymoron. The positive MY and the negative EX are like matter and antimatter, just way more powerful than you can see in the newly released “Angels and Deamons” movie (based on Dan Brown’s book of the same title but of a lessr casting than the novel, which had none). Yet, while matter and bloody minus matter notions are merely theoretical, apart of a circullar underground shaft in the European Alps, mine are real. And, with no further ado, after such a long introduction, which is also called sometimes captatio benevolentiae, I’ll go straight to the subject:
I was invited and I went to an art exhibition. Surely, you are not too excited about it. It’s just an art exhibition. Boring stuff for most of you. But what if I tell you who the artist is? Would you go for guys like Van Gogh? Surely! Or maybe? What about an artist simply called My Ex?
I did go to the opening. And she wasn’t even there! I mean: HER exibition! This is why we call them”My Ex”. They are so unreliable! I was only one hour late!
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And I didn’t like all her work this time but I did find two of her paintings worth taking a photos of.
If you are in Christchurch, New Zealand, you can see Cristina Silaghi’s work at the Coca Gallery until June 26th. That’s at number 66 Gloucester St.
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