It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for September 24th.
Today's word is jerkwater, spelled as one word, J-E-R-K-W-A-T-E-R.
Jerkwater 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 jerk waters,
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 nowhere towns connected by the lines on which these jerk water trains typically ran.
With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.