You read the word and without skipping a beat you know what it means. I am so clueless that I became aware of it for the first time in the past few days, in reviews of “Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1.”

The observation is made that Stephanie Meyer’s best-selling series of novels is profoundly heteronormative. Her heroine, Bella Swan, holds to a conventional belief in chastity before marriage, and when she finally weds Edward Cullen in the fourth film of the series, she gets pregnant on her wedding night and produces a child with alarming promptness.

The word, I learn, was coined in 1991. It summarizes a world view that creates a climate hostile to non-traditional sexuality. You have to give me credit. I may not have used the term, but I was right on top of the heteronormativeness of the first of the movies, “Twilight” (2008). What people don’t always recall is that the person most in favor of chastity was Edward. As I wrote: “Come on now, what is ‘Twilight’ really about? It’s about a teenage boy trying to practice abstinence, and how, in the heat of the moment, it’s really, really hard. And about a girl who wants to go all the way with him, and doesn’t care what might happen. He’s so beautiful she would do anything for him. She is the embodiment of the sentiment, ‘I’d die for you.’ She is, like many adolescents, a thanatophile.”