Ogdoad!

Ogdoad was the Minuteman's last Vocabulary Word of the Week. The Minuteman was a convenience store I ran in South Dakota back when I thought I wanted a career. I have a degree in business, you see.

I up and quit at the end of "Week Ogdoad" and nowadays, of course, I am a starving writer. The 9 to 5 grind is beyond me.

So I ran a convenience store before this and, lemme tell ya, it was a dream come true. Whenever I was ordering a case of energy drinks, I would pause wistfully, tears filling my eyes, and contemplate suicide.

But I tried to make it fun, and one of the ways was the Vocabulary Word of the Week. I would write it out in block capitals with a black sharpie and put it up on the store bulletin board every Monday where it would be promptly and continuously ignored by all my employees.

An ogdoad is a group of eight things and comes from the Greek. It has three syllables, not two, so it goes like this: og-doe-add. If you discover a used condom, a dead moth, a rusty screw, two golf balls, and three cigarette butts in, say, the water tank of your toilet, those items constitute an ogdoad. In this example, an ogdoad of weirdness.

It's a good, solid word, ogdoad. Every convenience store in the world should have a weekly vocabulary word to enrich, not only the communications skills, but the very lives of its downtrodden and underpaid employees.

Even if they ignore it.

For my part, I remember using ogdoad in sentences all week long, to the increasing annoyance of everyone:

"You know, if we had two more beers, this six pack would be an ogdoad."
"You know, if one of the Supreme Court Justices keeled over dead, there'd be only an ogdoad of Supreme Court Justices left."
"You know, I masturbated last night and faked an ogdoad of orgasms."

And so forth.

I remember my phone stopped ringing and my inbox was as barren and empty as the heart of a banker.

 But, hey, at least I sounded intelligent.