The Word of the Day is Precocious

No; I will never go back. I simply cannot choose the word of the day anymore.

This is a feature of how your friendly neighborhood strung-out support staff makes it through a day-cruise, where in addition to trying to get you drunk so your tab stays high enough that we make a livable wage, we suffer civilly through the captain's narrated sight-seeing tour of the intercoastal waterway.

The waterway doesn't change much; the tour doesn't change much. So we pick a word of the day and challenge the captain to insert it at his leisure. Captain Mark is the best captain to accomplish a word of the day challenge: he's not even subtle about it. He'll use the word ("exorbitant," say) in a sentence, then muse, "Exorbitant. That's a good word." Every...time.

I have only picked the word of the day twice. The first time, it was "precocious." I listened attentively, made drinks for the servers, buzzed the captain as is my duty when lunch service was starting so he could make an announcement for anyone who'd wandered under the influence of idle curiosity to the outer decks. He said over the PA, "Now for those of you who are dining with us today, I've just been informed by our precocious bartender downstairs that our lunch service is starting at this time." And then he said, "Precocious. That's a good word."

I buzzed him again. He picked up the phone in the wheelhouse and all I heard was evil-villain mwahahaha-ing into the receiver, and then he hung up on me.

Weeks later I ventured to pick the word of the day again, for a different captain, who also thought it would be funny to use the word in reference to me, in precisely the same manner.

This time I'd picked "depraved."