Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word:

MEPHITIC

Before we understood what the Anopheles mosquito was doing to people it was thought that malaria (from mala aria, "bad air) was caused by exhalations from marshes. The word to describe that air, those exhalations, is mephitic (pronounced meh-FIT-ick) — bad-smelling, poisonous, noxious.

It comes from the late Latin mephiticus, which is turns derives from mephitis, "noxious exhalation," a bad-smelling vapor from the earth. The Latin survives today in a species name, Mephitis mephitis, the striped skunk.

Example: Colleagues rose as one in protest of the mephitic vapors from the fish he reheated in the office microwave.