The best word ever

I've long held the erroneous opinion that the best word in the English language was "fuck," since it is by far the most versatile word our language has to offer. It's a noun, verb, adjective and, obviously, an expletive. "I fucking fucked that fucking fucker," is a grammatically-correct and complete construction, though it's admitted that the various meanings of the word may leave some doubt as to meaning--was the fucker actually fucking when he was fucked, or is he merely fucking, and was he alive or dead after he was fucked? So the sentence is vague, yes, and one would need some context to know who might be congratulated or who might be mourned; nonetheless, it's essential correctness is unquestionable.

So "fuck" is a perfectly wonderful word. However, it isn't the most wonderful word in the English language. The evidence has been entirely before me for most of my life, and yet I didn't have the epiphany until the other day. Rather, I knew of the wonderful qualities of the best word in the English language--its compactness, its self-reflexive, Ouroborors-ish nature, and its unique poetic quality--but it didn't occur to me that these individual facts added up to a point of some minor consequence, that the best word in the entire width, breadth and depth of the English language is:

ORANGE

Consider this, the most crucial thing about the word orange: this is a word that can only be used as a noun or as an adjective (i.e. it lacks fuck's inherent versatility and flexibility), but the noun is defined only by the adjective--an orange is a fruit that is orange--and the adjective is only really defined by the noun--orange is the color of oranges. Further, as is well-known, orange is a word which has no rhymes, at least none that aren't proper nouns. And one must suspect that even those names that rhyme with orange must have come into being long after Westerners discovered the fruit, and were adopted by people trying too hard to distinguish themselves and seizing upon the idea of rhyming themselves with orange as a futile slash at fame.

Actually, there's one minor inaccuracy or flaw in the previous paragraph, but not really: orange can, of course, also be used as an adjective to describe flavor and not just color. Only here again we come upon the word chasing its own tail: what does orange taste like? Orange is the flavor of oranges, a kind of fruit that is orange.

No doubt some will entertain the objection that orange can be defined as a yellow-red or red-yellow color, but really: do either of those hyphenated constructions do justice to actual orange. If I ask for yellow-red or red-yellow, I'm bound to get something other than orange, whereas if I ask you for orange you will give it to me. We all know precisely what orange is and what is orange within a few nanometers of wavelength.

We're told that orange entered the English language in somewhat the same fashion as algebra--from the Arabic, in which one finds the word nāranj. This is an oversimplification in a way: the Arabs derived the word from Persian and the Persians from Sanskrit, and English actually came into the word via the French who got it from the Spanish but left the "n" off the front for whatever reason; I'd like to think it's because of the negatory meaning of ne in French, and that the French realized an orange is something, not a nothing as might be implied if one called it something sounding like ne orenge ("Non," the Frenchman says, "c'est l'orenge, non ne orenge, idiot," or something along those lines--it's been at least twenty years since I last used French for anything, and then I only used it on a test in high school. So excuse me if my usage is utterly orange with rust.) But Arabic seems to me, without research, to be the crucial link, since the Arabs surely gave the word to the Spanish during the seven centuries the peninsula belonged to the Moors. Anyway, it lets me point out how vaguely similar "orange" is to "algebra," kind of.

Regardless of whether the word comes to us via Arabic or from some strange planet vibrating at a strange frequency in a wavelength of 600 nanometers, it is what it is, and the only thing it is is orange, and it is the perfect word. Read it, and weep in joy and frustration, reverence and awe, fear and loathing, love and tender respect.