Vocabulary words of the day

Skiing is not just about sports and fitness. It's about learnin'. I learned that some of our skiers didn't know how to take a circuitous route back to school. Or a tortuous route. Well, we took a circuitous route from the school to the back road between the stadium and the baseball field. On the far soccer field behind the elementary school, our route became quite tortuous. Circuitous is only kind of like circuit. In a strength circuit, we do a series of exercises over and over. But a circuitous conversation is one that wanders around before reaching a point. One that just wanders around is more desultory. Or maybe that's one that jumps from one topic to another? Tortuous is more twisty than circuitous. And there's not really an endpoint when we describe something as tortuous. For all you engineering types, tortuous shares the same root as torsion, which is a type of loading in which a structure is twisted (other types of loading are tension, compression, and bending). Medical types also use the word torsion and my legs are twisting just thinking about it.