In a word... sex

One of our favourite jokes from those early years at secondary school was that “the Romans had sex between five and seven”. We thought it so clever then, assisted by our classical education at St Nathy’s College, Ballaghaderreen.

Because “everyone” knew that sex was the Latin word for six. It allowed us enjoy the frisson of saying the word “sex” openly in front of our priest/teachers while also furtively enjoying its probable connotations which, in those days, amounted to purest theory for us all. Like geometry.

An exception might be some singular activity which, though enjoyable at the time, was spoiled by the little death guilt brought in its wake.

The first time I heard about sex I was appalled and disgusted. That such as us came into being in the same way as animals in the fields seemed a sort of divine insult. I’d have preferred to go on believing I was found under a head of cabbage. As for my parents’ role in my being . . . well, I just couldn’t conceive.

My imagination refused to go there.

What was remarkable though was the rapidity that this disgust gave way to a simple desire, so-to-speak, to find out everything I could about sex. My appetite, so-to-speak, for such knowledge was soon as insatiable as that information seemed infinite.

This, inevitably, prompted an anxiety to put such information into practice, there being no better route to true knowledge. Not easy in the Ireland of my youth where to be pure was very heaven, and the only route there.

There where the good boy was a pallid youth of incorporeal being residing in a temple whose sole role was to forever deny itself in pleasuring soul.

It meant that in reality for most of us sex was indeed just a Latin word for that number which comes between five and seven. Some brave and lucky explorers among us did venture where most were not afforded opportunity. On heroic return they filled us in with, probably, incredible tales of daring do.

Ah, sweet innocence of youth.

From the Latin sexus, a noun meaning "a state of being either male or female", believed first used in English in medieval times. Only used in the verbal sense since early 20th century when such as writer D H Laurence began to use the phrase "having sex".

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