Thanks to my youngest daughter, we built our collective family vocabulary, five words at a time

Until recently, on many weekday mornings, my daughter Melanie would pop into our family chat with a text that looked something like this:

Morning vocab

- Puerile
- Stasis
- Maxim
- Recrudesce
- Corrugated

These were lists of words that Melanie had picked up in her reading (she has become quite the voracious reader). When she came across a term she didn't understand, she would write it down and look it up, an admirable practice with which the vast majority of us are too lazy to bother.

She would then assign a member of the chat to use at least one of the words from that day's list in a sentence. The penalty for non-compliance was losing the opportunity the next time it was your turn to come up with the sentence.

As you can see from the list above, these were not necessarily strange or obscure words. Rather, they were words that Mel and the rest of us may or may not have come across before, and even if we had, we may or may not have known their precise meaning.

Given that we have some writers in the family, and given the wide age range among the nine of us, some people's vocabularies are necessarily larger than others. But everyone participated regardless, and it was one of my favorite uses for the family text chat, which otherwise can go in some pretty strange directions.

There were always bonus points if you could come up with a sentence using all five words on the list, something that was achieved with regularity among the more ambitious in our group.

Recently, Mel informed us she was running out of words for the daily lists. I hope she either comes up with more or maybe reduces the frequency with which she sends them out. I will never be guilty of floccinaucinihilipilification in assessing this practice of ours.