Sweet talk

Like many men, I struggle to think of decent chat up lines. I'm in a pub or a club and a girl is giving me the eyes, when I'm at the bar, there she suddenly is, by my side. This is an opportunity. All I need to do is think of something to good to say and we can get a conversation going. Inevitably, I fail. All I can think of is 'have you been here long?', 'what's a girl like you doing in a place like this?', or 'did you see the football earlier?' I give up and try to look the strong and silent type but it never works out.

I spoke to my friend who is pretty good at it for some advice. He suggested saying 'I like your hair'. Sounds worse than 'have you been here long?' to me. What is needed is a scientific analysis of the English language in search for its sexiest words. If we can work out what they are, then by stringing them together in a sentence we should come up with an opening line seductive enough to sweep a girl off her feet.

Asking myself what the sexiest word in the English language is my immediate reaction was 'cleavage'. That's because I find cleavage very sexy. But obviously that's completely the wrong criteria here and not the approach to take at all. Just because the thing a word describes turns you on doesn't make the word itself attractive. 'Boobies' are very, very seductive, but the word itself isn't going to win any beauty contest. If we continued down this line the eventual chat up line we would arrive at would be: 'Cleavage sucking boobies, kissing fuck.' I don't think that'll get a date.

The thing to do is forget the signified and concentrate only on the signifier. What makes a sexy word then? It took me a while to work out how to do this. At first I freestyled words and tried to pick out ones that sounded nice. 'Raunchy' came first. This obviously shows traces of my earlier approach but the word itself is quite nice. 'Ravishing' falls into this category too. Odder ones that passed this test were, 'drivel', 'crouton', 'Maastricht', 'lesion' and 'marionette'. This was getting somewhere but I could tell it wasn't quite there yet. If I say 'Raunchy clarinet, marionette lesion in Maastricht' to the next girl I meet I don't think it's going to have her gazing longingly into my eyes.

I sat back and considered the problem a bit more. French words were clearly cropping up disproportionately often. They say French is the language of love and so perhaps the answer was going to be that I should just speak French. We can't have that though, French words can't be sexier than English ones. Those baguette munching frog killers can't have a better language than ours. I decided that it wasn't their language but their pronunciation that was turning me on. They're such a sex crazed nation that lust has clearly permeated their accent. The reason French words were jumping out at me was because I was saying them in a slightly French accent and they were therefore sounding more seductive. The thing to do would be to say lots of English words in a French voice and that would help unlock the Casanova inside them.

After a good evening spent working at this, I believe that the approach has been successful. Here is my list of the sexiest English words:
drainage
splendid
toxicity
insouciance
suspect
menagerie (obvs Fr orig. but ours now)
gasoline
plywood
sycophant
Obviously my lists have been almost exclusively nouns. Tomorrow I will look for sexy verbs and adjectives. I may have to apply different criteria apart from the raw oral ravishment measure I have been using so far. Otherwise my sentence is going to be fairly meaningless. For now my aphrodisiac chat up line is:
suspect menagerie, splendid drainage sycophantic toxicity'.

There's a barmaid I fancy down the road. When extremely drunk once I asked her, as a chat up line, 'Do you know how to spell 'golden nuggets'? I can't really go down from there so I might try it out on her.