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.

The family text chat group: Misplaced mail, memories of years past, and endless cat photos

We have a family text group that includes all seven of us plus two significant others (Mark and Lyndsey). It is active almost every day and is used for a variety of purposes.

One recent conversation, for example, centered on Chloe's ongoing attempts to convince the post office that a former resident of her house is, in fact, a former resident and no longer lives there. Several times she has taken items intended for this person and written "Return to Sender" and "Not at This Address" on them, but mail for the previous occupant keeps on coming.

This was followed up by texts from other family members with suggestions on how to handle the situation, and one threat from Jared to alert the authorities that Chloe is committing mail fraud if she starts simply throwing these misaddressed cards and letters away.

He was kidding (I think).

Almost every day it's something different in the chat group, but there are at least three common types of activity you'll find there:

(1) Cat content: We are a cat family and my kids like to share photos of their current cats as well as the cats with which they grew up. I enjoy all of this because it's sometimes the only way I can keep tabs on my grand-kitties. (As you can see above, the official photo of the text group is an old image of Fred, George and Charlie, three of our former cats who have each moved on to their greater good, as my friend Kate Tonti would say.)

(2) Random memories: These conversations will often begin with one kid texting something like, "Thinking about the times Lissy and I used to sit at the computer at the old house and play Harry Potter." Then they will all go back and forth about the details of the game that have stuck with them. We also sometimes get memories of stuff we wouldn't let them do when they were little that their friends were allowed to do. There's always some bitterness there.

(3) Big announcements: Suddenly one child or another will text, "Attention everyone, I have a new job," or some such off-the-cuff piece of important news. Everyone then celebrates through congratulatory messages, "heart" and "exclamation point" reactions, and the occasional funny GIF. Twenty years ago, conveying this news would have involved separate phone calls to parents and siblings. Now it's just a single 7-second text. I'm not sure which is better.

Gotta go, Melanie just sent a great picture of two of her cats standing on their hind legs looking out the front door. <heart emoji>