Words! Words! Words!

I'm hardly what one might call perspicacious - demonstrably fanatic about adverbs, asides, parentheticals, ellipses, and... well you know - but I am rather enamored of single syllable words that can encapsulate entire strings of words in a single utterance. For instance, ex(-). It contains a lot of information in two little letters and an optional dash: "person who used to be but no longer is..." being the most basic meaning, but often with underlying emotional tone about the "no longer is" part. The root, "away from"/"out of", is suitably evocative and appropriate. It's not simple and straightforward, necessarily. Certain idioms mix with ex like oil and water. Sometimes, for instance, "former" or "old" is the preferred idiom. It's "ex-president", but "former marine;"it's "ex-friend," but probably "old boss" unless the job change was acrimonious.

Even more idiosyncratic (and thus interesting to me) is its use in noun form, in which it completely substitutes for the word it once modifies: ex. Occasionally it even serves as a handy word for relationships that may never have had a succinct lexical description (unless you're the sort to refer to somebody as a "lover" with a straight face or "person who might inspire me to click off the 'it's complicated' box on my social networking profiles") pre-termination.

Ex, the noun, is intriguingly malleable. The undertones of the utterance depend on context, as one would expect, but also upon the article or modifier that precedes it. My/your/her ex seems to me to be used mostly to reference a single person even when that person is not identified to the interlocutor. I am specifically thinking about those meme-surveys that get around the internet. Almost all of these surveys ask at least a handful of questions about your ex; this seems incredibly open-ended, considering the average survey taker has probably dated many people who could be described as exes. And yet, one rarely sees these questions refer to your exes. In these cases, it's likely that your ex refers to a specific person.

My best guess is that this suggests either your most recent ex or the person who has been the most significant significant other and thus immediately evokes the idea of exes more than any other ex. The use of the possessive immediately personalizes the description. Referring to somebody as an ex adds a sense of distance not present in the former description by taking the speaker out it altogether. My ex is closer to my husband in that you would never refer to your matrimonial partner as a husband. There's an element of proximity that suggests allegorical emotional connotations. Of course, the ex is even more personalized in its singularity: it immediately suggests reference back to multiple conversations. It's infrequently used, but for circumstances involving the singular ex-spouse or circumstances where the break-up is extraordinarily fresh.

In my half assed linguistic theorizing, the spectrum goes (from most recent/emotionally involved to least): the ex -> my ex -> an ex -> a return to the adverbial phrase of the "guy I used to date" sort -> a guy I used to know... or maybe "friend" if the relationship between exes is ongoing enough to completely redefine the relationship.

I do sometimes feel that there should be a term to more accurately describe somebody who is *an* ex, but perhaps no longer is recent enough to be my ex/the ex - sometimes I mentally refer to people as things like ex-once-removed, but I suppose that this would eliminate some of the succinct beauty of the single word.

And yes, that was totally random.