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Emacs has two methods of killing words: kill-word kills from the point to the end of the word, kill-word-backward kills from the beginning of the word to the point. More often than not I’d like to kill the whole word with one key-stroke. Here is my implementation of this functionality:

(defcustom brutal-word-regex "s_|sw"
  "Regular expression that defines a character
   allowed in a word, i.e., not word boundary. Should
   match only one character at a time."
  :type 'regexp
  :group 'user)

(defun brutally-kill-word ()
  "Kills the whole word (as defined by the
   brutal-word-regex) regardless of where the point is in it."
  (interactive)
                                        ; Work only if point is inside of a word
  (if (looking-at brutal-word-regex)
      (save-excursion
                                        ; Back up till the word boundary, one char at a time.
        (while (looking-at brutal-word-regex) (backward-char))
                                        ; Search for the whole word ...
        (search-forward-regexp (concat "(" brutal-word-regex ")+") nil t)
                                        ; ... and replace it with empty string
        (replace-match "")
                                        ; Remove extra spaces if they are there
        (if (eq (char-after) ? ) (just-one-space)))))

(global-set-key "M-d" 'brutally-kill-word)