It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 24th.

Today's word is jerk water, spelled as one J-E-R-K-W-A-T-E-R.

Jerk-W-A-E-R. Jerk-W-A-E-R-T-E-R-T-E-R is an adjective.

It means remote and unimportant.

It's often used to describe a small town or village that is out in the

country far from cities. Jerkwater can also mean trivial. Here's the word used in a sentence

from the Auburn Journal.

We found a theater in some jerkwater town with a new movie playing.

We owe the colorful Americanism jerkwater to the invention of the steam engine,

an advancement that significantly accelerated travel by rail, but also had its drawbacks.

One drawback was that the boilers of the early locomotives needed to be

refilled with water frequently and water tanks were few and far between. As a

result, the small trains that ran on rural branch lines often had to stop to take on water from local supplies.

Such trains were commonly called jerkwaters, from the motion of jerking the water up in buckets from the supply to the engine.

The derogatory use of jerk water for things unimportant or trivial

reflects attitudes about the small middle-of-now-here towns connected by the lines on which these

jerk water trains typically ran.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski. Visit Marion Webster.

Webster.com today for definitions, word play and trending word lookups.