Logorrhea

As a teacher of high school English, I embraced every lesson as an opportunity to introduce interesting and unusual words. This surreptitious instruction started on day one when I introduced myself as a bibliophile and logophile.

From logophile it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to logorrhea. “It’s like diarrhea, but with words!” I eagerly explained, hoping that my graphic analogy would get their attention. Those who looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears would receive an invitation to check the dictionary at the front of the room. If they caught me on a good day, I’d let them use their phones; vocabulary.com would close the deal with their straight-forward explanation: If someone's always mouthing off and just can't shut up, they've got logorrhea, a pathological inability to stop talking.

Having won the battle, however, I still lost the war; unlike other five-star words like juggernaut and troglodyte, logorrhea did not make its way into their post-literate lexicon. But then, on September 29th, Rachel Maddow used the word on live tv. The MSNBC commentator was describing the first debate between President Donald Trump and Vice President Joe Biden. I can only hope at least one of my students heard her, recalled a certain crazy teacher, and nodded wisely.