Word to use today: aardvark.

I love this word because if you say it in a growly voice it makes you sound like something from Outer Space. Aardvarks hate all fruit apart from aardvark cucumbers, but will eat as many as fifty thousand ants in one night. Yum!
Aardvarks are so odd that even their nearest relations on the animal family tree, sirenians, tenrecs and elephants, are very different from them.
The word aardvark comes from the Africaans word aarde which means earth or ground, and varken, pig.
Tip for using the word aardvark. Do you know anyone with really weird relations?

Another thing I love about the word aardvark is that in English we have taken the same elements - earth+pig - and ended up with something completely different.

Aardvark has that lovely by hook or by crook I'll be first in your book thing, too. Well, except for aalii, which is beautiful but, quite frankly, just doesn't have the same star quality.