Not every Toastmasters club features a “Word of the Day,” but VanCore does.

Each week, one member floats a relatively uncommon but useful word, with a view to building everybody’s working vocabulary. The challenge is then for people to use that word sometime during the meeting. It can require quite the mental gymnastics to work it in. But it’s worth the trouble, because only with use do new words get burned in to your brain.

Past-president Jonathan is invariably the man to beat in this endeavor; Jonathan’s unofficial record, marked a few months ago, is NINE deployments of the word “penultimate.” (Meaning: “Second-to-last.”)

With this week’s word, “peregrinations” (Meaning: Travels or wanderings), Jonathan again ran up the score, summoning the word six times. He used it figuratively (noting that several speeches had arrived at their points after lengthy, time-burning peregrinations). And he used it literally, noting that a speech about travel traced the peregrinations of its author.

For what it’s worth, Bruce was thrilled at today’s word — he and his wife came THIS close to naming their oldest daughter Peregrine. But he still forgot to use it during the meeting.

Words are what we work with, folks. You can never have enough of them in the bag.