Not everyone is perhaps familiar with the vernacular term “mindfuck”, although the constituent words themselves are suggestive of at least some of its sense as a composite expression. The term brings together a pair of incongruous elements – one mental, the other physical – to produce a kind of internal semantic dissonance (lexical friction, we might say). It feels oxymoronic, yet intelligible. Hearing the expression, we naturally form the idea of some sort of assault on the mind, an invasive operation performed on the psychological state of the person. The sexual meaning of “fuck” suggests something unusually intimate, and potentially violating, even violent, although a connotation of the pleasurable is not ruled out. But it is a type of fucking directed towards the mental part of a person, not the bodily part (not that regular fucking has no mental target). The online encyclopedia Wikipedia has defined it succinctly thus: “Mindfuck means either a thing that messes with the minds of those exposed to it or the act of doing so”. The HarperCollins American Slang has the following entry under “mind-fuck” (they retain the hyphen): “To manipulate someone to think and act as one wishes”, and it equates the word with “brainwash”. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers a greater variety of definitions. As a noun, the word is defined as “An imaginary act of sexual intercourse” and “A disturbing or revelatory experience, esp. one which is drug-induced or is caused by deliberate psychological manipulation.