One of the first things I do every morning while drinking that first cup of coffee is get the Word of the Day on my phone.

I suppose you could call me a wordie.

At least you’d be using a real word. Wordie is now one of the 850 new words Merriam-Webster added to their dictionary Monday.

This is exciting news for me. I am intrigued by words. I love learning new words. It’s this curiosity about words that I feel contributes to my vibrancy as I age. I consider words brain-boosting fuel.

I often look up words while reading novels. And I frequently look up words on restaurant menus, as some are so esoteric.

I love doing that Spelling Bee word puzzle in the back of the Sunday New York Times Magazine. It’s not a crossword puzzle (which I’m not into), but a “how many words can you create with these seven letters?” type thing. I’ve never reached genius rank though – only a couple times excellent. Usually I’m just one shy of excellent, which keeps me in the good (lowest) category. Sunday’s often mean listening to Will Shortz on NPR with his Sunday Puzzle, too.

Speaking of Spelling Bees, social media has made it so much easier to follow minute-by-minute happenings at the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Fellow wordies, it’ll be May 30 and 31 this year. It’s already on my Google calendar, because Jeff and I plan on watching the final like we did last year. Popcorn time!

Whenever grandson Elijah spends the night, he wakes up the next morning asking “What’s the word of the day, Grammy?”

I think I’ll tell him about these latest word additions. But I won’t be able to mention most them, because Merriam-Webster hasn’t released the whole list.

But I can tell you this:

Guys, no need to mansplain. This whole aquafaba craze seems a bit too fussy for me. I think I subtweeted during a webinar once because of the presenter’s misleading information on nutrition. Hmm…if I like red wines with oaky overtones, does that mean I wouldn’t like unoaked? I never really watched The Simpsons, but apparently they invented embiggen. (Elijah will probably laugh at that word.) Glamping is not on my agenda this summer. I created a Moroccan Sweet Potato Hummus recipe with harissa, one of hottest food ingredients this year. It’ll be hard to get people to correctly pronounce za’tar, since many still can’t say quinoa. I still don’t really understand cryptocurrency. Welp, I just don’t have the bandwidth for any more writing tonight.