can you pyknic?

I work on the 38th floor of an office building so am daily "captivated" by a video monitor that plays in the elevator. It offers up all kinds of useful, deliberately pleasant and non-confrontational information, like the local (yea, it's going to rain tomorrow!) and national weather, news headlines from reliable sources like USA Today, and knowledge-enriching tidbits like today's word of the day, pyknic. Can you guess?

(ADJ.) PIK'-NIK - having a short, stocky physique

The pyknic man was unable to qualify for the marathon.

If only I could be a fly on the proverbial wall of every encounter that takes place within the first couple of days after these mini-educations; I'd love to know how often this new vocabulary gets worked into casual conversation. I truly am interested in language and usage and how few words are in circulation at any given time. I remember reading a story years ago about a town where the residents only had vocabularies of about 300 words, and also about how the vocabulary in college students' papers was becoming increasingly limited to the offerings in the Microsoft Word thesaurus. Really, I'd love to just overhear some eager person using one of our new words. I'd know we were part of the same world of elevator education. After all, you gotta take your perks where you get 'em.

As you can see, I'm trying to make the best of my current situation. As I make coffee and photocopy and try to decide whether to get my shoes repaired, I'm trying not to go here:

Because here is bad.