Good day, most literate reader.  The Word of the Day is extirpate.  Though it sounds like a term your dentist would use in describing cavity treatment, extirpate means to destroy or exterminate completely; often used in relation to disease or pests.
This beautifully menacing word hails from the Latin ‘exstirpare,’ meaning ‘to root out.’ It’s like the Terminator of words, all about total annihilation, no prisoners taken.  Which makes it one of the most awesome words one can have in one’s lexicological arsenal.  It should also, then, come as no surprise that it was the inspiration for my latest contribution to the English canon: sextirpate, which means, vaguely, to somehow fuck somebody completely out of existence.  The mind simply reels at the possibilities when contemplating the mechanics of such an event.  Anyway, that’s another Word for another Day.  Here’s extirpate:

Dream #721
The tale of Bill Lee, exterminator extraordinaire for the shadowy outfit that went by the name Interzone Inc., unfolded like a hallucinogenic daydream on a scorching Moroccan afternoon. Lee’s work had nothing to do with roaches or rats; his prey was of a much more delicate and dangerous variety—human vices, frayed thoughts stitched into the fabric of a corroding society.
He operated in the alleyways of existence, where the sunlight dared not penetrate. Armed with his Gashouse Pistol—a contraption more suited for the pages of a pulp novel than reality—he set about his business with the solemn duty of an otherworldly surgeon needing to extirpate a virulent cancer.
On this particular dive into the heart of the Interzone, where the air was thick with argot and narcotics perfumed the atmosphere, he had his sights trained on a new breed of pestilence. A mind-eating parasite, one that latched onto the consciousness of its host, whispering sweet insanities and dragging them into the soft, welcoming arms of delirium.
Lee slinked through the human bazaar, past hawkers of flesh and dream merchants peddling their ephemeral wares. The chatter of the crowd was a disjointed symphony, a cacophony of desire and desperation that wove itself into the very essence of the Interzone, a tapestry of the soul’s darkest cravings.
He found his mark in a smoke-filled den, a place where existential dread came to drown itself in opium and absinthe. The target? A writer, or so he called himself, scribbling away on stained parchment, his once lucid eyes now clouded by the parasite’s embrace.
Bill Lee approached, the Gashouse Pistol concealed beneath his tattered trench coat, its presence as ominous as the silence before a gunshot. “You’ve got something in your head,” Lee stated, not a question but a terminal diagnosis.
The writer looked up, his grin a cracked reflection of his fractured psyche. “It whispers truths,” he replied, his voice a being unto itself, “the kind that kills if left untended.”
Without a flicker of hesitation, Bill Lee drew his weapon, unceremoniously discharging it into the writer’s temple. But instead of blood and bone, a plume of ink-black vapor emanated from the wound, coiling and twisting as it evaporated into the stale air.
The parasite was gone, extirpated by the hands of an executioner ordained by the Interzone to maintain the balance between the sane world and the chasm of madness threatening to engulf it.
Bill Lee pocketed his weapon as the den’s inhabitants stared, the collective pause a moment of reverence for the necessary evil just enacted. He stepped out into the twilight, leaving behind only the legend of the exterminator, the shadow man, the dealer of decrees in a land ruled by the capricious nature of the mind’s abyss.
In the Interzone, Bill Lee’s work was never done, for every vice extinguished, another was born, and his haunting silhouette would always be there, lurking, waiting to administer the cure that was often worse than the disease.

N.P.: “Seven Souls” – William S. Burroughs