What’s the Word?

While I was considering “brain rot,” the Oxford University Press 2024 Word of the Year, for a recent article, it brought to mind Mr. Hickey. When I was a sophomore at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, the English teacher became ill shortly after the school year started. A substitute, Mr. Hickey, took over the class, and he ended up teaching our class for the entire school year.

Mr. Hickey was a gifted teacher. One of his methods was particularly endearing. He would teach a new word every day. We would be asked to use the word in a sentence, and very quickly the word became part of our daily vocabulary. These words were not uncommon ones, and it is hard for me to remember which words that I use now were originally a Hickey word. I do recall that “incessant” was one of these. When I talk with former classmates, they remember other words such as “persistent” or “incomparable.” For 10th-grade students, these may have been new words, but they are certainly not unusual in everyday speech or writing.

And that brings me to an unsolicited email that I get called “Word Daily.” It presents a new word along with a definition and a sound clip that teaches you how to pronounce the word. Thinking back to Mr. Hickey, I always open the email to find what item I might add to my vocabulary. I have to confess that I wonder about the words offered for my consumption.

In a recent posting, for instance, the word offered is “ennead.” This means a group or set of nine. Wonderful. The next time I am out to dinner with eight friends, I can add myself to the group and state in my diary that “An ennead of friends had dinner at Chili’s.” I’m sure that would be accurate, but really…I just don’t think Mr. Hickey would be happy about this one. And what word would I use if one person didn’t show up? 

Another more entertaining entry was the word “bosky.” This means “a wooded area, somewhere covered by trees or bushes.” You might tell a friend that “The park behind my house is bosky.” I think the friend would think you are a little bosky yourself.

Oh, but this recent one is an important word to know. It was “alliaceous.” This means “relating to plants of a group that comprises onions and other alliums.” Hopefully, you know what an “allium” is. You might want to tell a friend after dinner that “I really enjoyed the fajitas because they had such a nice alliaceous odor.” Yeah, sure.

Some of these words can be tricky. One offering was “envoi.” No, this is not a misspelling of “envoy” although it is pronounced the same. It means “a short stanza concluding a ballade” or “an author’s concluding words.” I doubt you’d please Mr. Hickey by writing that it’s a good thing that at the end of War and Peace, Tolstoy did not add an envoi as the book was long enough.

Perhaps my favorite new word is “dithyramb.” You pronounce it just as it is written. This useful addition to your vocabulary means “a wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, especially one dedicated to Dionysus.” By extension, it may mean “a passionate or inflated speech, poem, or other writing,” and I guess it does not absolutely have to be dedicated to Dionysus. So what, there are plenty of other deities like Ganesh or Thor.

This word was one I actually had heard sometime in my distant past. “Soupçon” indicates “a very small quantity of something.” Of course, I had no recollection of what it meant, so I guess Word Daily did educate me. The example sentence was one I am sure all women readers will find useful. The site offered the following: “There was a soupçon of nail polish left in the bottle.”

I suspect that at this point you get the idea, but I must offer one more word. Word Daily presented “trialogue.” This is defined as “a dialogue between three people.” Now, I find a problem with this one. First of all, “between” is a word that separates two things, not three. More to the point, a dialogue is “a conversation between two or more persons.” So, “dialogue” already takes care of a conversational ménage à trois. Who needs “trialogue?” I don’t.

I guess that I will continue to open the Word Daily emails and the incessant supply of words that I will never use. I just wonder what Mr. Hickey would have to say concerning this alliaceous dithyramb about a soupçon of unusual words. I think he’d exclaim, “Brain rot!” And that is my envoi to this message. 

Editor’s note: For more, see Brain Rot: It was the 'word of the year' by Ben Portnoy in our Feb. 2025 issue.