My word of the day was detritus. The sentence given was: "The blog originated ... as a catch basin for mental detritus, for the kind
of stuff not good enough for print, but too good to waste on casual
conversation." (Joel Achenbach, _The Washington Post_, August 21, 2005)

I also discovered that the Marine Biological Lab has an institutional subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary online. Maybe this job is too good to give up.