X-ing People Out

In the olden days, like when I was a teenager, people still wrote letters.  It was fun.  You could write them on all sorts of things... glossy ads from magazines, paper napkins in restaurants, fancy paper from the stationary shop.  Then you put it in an envelope and viola! a few days later, whomever you  had written had the message in their hand.  The same message you had been in physical contact with before.  If the person you wrote to was in a far off land, there was somehow a physical connection established.

One of the interesting things about letter writing was that it was usually done in ink.  If you miswrote, or changed your mind about something you had written, you either had to start again, or cross things out.  Guess which method was more popular?  No delete buttons on pens.  Reading through crossed out lines was something of an art form.  You can imagine why... did he tell me that he loved me but then decide it was too early in our relationship to write that?  Was this misspelling really a Freudian slip?  My cousins and I spent a lot of time trying to read under the crossed out stuff.

Perhaps this is why it bothers me a little that we refer to a real person as our "ex".  What does that mean?  That we miss acted when we got married and had children?  That the person no longer exists?  A giant Freudian slip?

I was on an airplane once distractedly watching my seat mate do her homework.  When I glanced at the report she was writing, I burst out laughing.  She was writing a report on Malcolm Ex.  She was annoyed to have me laugh at her.  I told her that I thought she should write about the religious epiphany he had experienced in Mecca, that it was probably one of the most important spiritual awakenings of the 20th century.  I'm pretty sure that she had no idea what I was talking about.

But I digress (actually everything in this blog could technically be called a digression).  Malcolm X changed his name because white slave owners had obliterated his identity.  The X was a reminder that he was his own person and of the fight to become his own person.  The African American name that I really like is Morgan Freeman, nobody is getting ex-ed but nobody is confused about ownership.  He is his own man.

I wonder if there is a more respectful term for someone who was once central in some way to our lives.