David Newnham suffers from word rage while stuck behind a lorry
The lorry in front is driving me crazy. It’s been crawling along for 12 miles. But this isn’t about road rage - it’s about word rage.
Most trucks carry their owner’s name - Norbert Dentressangle springs to mind. There might be a slogan such as “Lightening the load”. And if you’re lucky, the question: “How’s my driving?” followed by the boss’s telephone number.
But this lorry has a single word painted across its rear end. It simply says HISEX.
At an average speed of one mile every two minutes, I’ve had almost half an hour to think about HISEX, and I’m getting nowhere fast.
How do you say it? High-sex? Hee-sex? Hissocks? And what does it mean?
You can still buy bumper stickers that say “Make love not war - see driver for details”. But even with punctuation, HISEX isn’t much of a come-on.
Perhaps I’m wrong to think about sex. Broken into “his” and “ex”, HISEX resembles the names people give their yachts. Yet after wrestling for several minutes with former girlfriends and malicious wives, I can get no sense out of “his ex”
At one point, a bend offers a side view of the lorry, and I briefly glimpse the word “poultry”. Aha! Is this a wagon-load of ultra-libidinous cock-a-doodle-doos perhaps? No, there has to be more to it.
I recall a riddle (acrostic?) which involved writing “Have you any eggs?” and “Yes, I have ham and eggs” as FUNEX and SIFMNX respectively. But even applying these rules, all I get from HISEX is “age I yes eggs”, which as a marketing slogan is hardly going to revitalise the rural economy overnight.
Then, finally, the lorry turns into a farm entrance. There is a sign by the gate, and a phone number. So when I get home, I ring it.
“It’s about your lorries,” I hear myself saying.“Would you mind telling me what’s meant by, er, hissocks?”, A man’s voice chuckles.“Hissocks?” he says.“Hi-sex.”
And he reveals that HISEX refers to a breed of poultry in which all females are yellow and all males white.
“It’s an amalgam of ‘hybrid’ and ‘sexability’,” he explains.
Yes, I know. That would give HYSEX, not HISEX. But why don’t you ring the man? Like I said, this word is driving me crazy.
