: finely done or made : very beautiful or delicate
: very sensitive or fine
: extreme or intense
Now, I'm a guy. I understand the different meanings, but testosterone makes me like the last one best. Extreme or Intense.
That's the definition I inevitably go for when I use the work exquisite. Exquisite beauty, exquisite pain. An intense beauty. An extreme pain. Tinfoil caught between the teeth as you're biting down; the scintillating, overwhelming agony of a broken bone or, worse, a broken heart.
I love words. I love that, in the English language, they can have so may delightful definitions. A story by its nature is words. The ones we choose are the building blocks we work with. They are our clay, our palette, our canvas, our paint. We sculpt them, stitch them, paste them in place and the end result is, if we are very lucky, exquisite. On rare occasions we get lucky and we just might create art. Even rarer, we might -gasp- create literature.
Exquisite. I might have used that word a dozen times in the literally millions of words I have in print. But it is a truly powerful word, and I think one best saved for occasions that demand no less.
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