I rarely drink coffee, and so I rarely find myself in Starbucks.

But the other day I wandered into a Starbucks with my sister and her boyfriend and, while they pondered which fancy beverages to order, I noticed that the word deleterious was printed on a dry erase board at the counter. “Define this word and win a free espresso,” the board said.

“Hey, anybody want a free espresso?” I asked.

“Deleterious?” my sister and her boyfriend asked. “What does it mean?”

“Deleterious,” I recited, relishing the sound of this marvelous word. “Harmful.”

“Congratulations,” the woman behind the counter said, and fetched me a free double espresso. It was all so much fun I couldn’t help but think that if I’d known Starbucks sponsored vocabulary games, I would have become a regular customer years ago.

I’ve always loved words. For years, I loved learning them. “We’ll never use these words,” some of my high school classmates used to complain, when we received our weekly vocabulary words, but I never understood what they were talking about, as there are plenty of opportunities to use words like sycophantic and enervated and dearth.

But my attitude changed abruptly during my junior year of high school. There was a lot of worrying and anxiety about the SAT, that absurd test high school students are supposed to take, and each week my English Lit. teacher passed out a huge package of worksheets, along with 30 new vocabulary words. These worksheets were our primary focus; I remember reading half of “Pride and Prejudice” and then watching the second half of the book on film. We brushed up on “Frankenstein” in similar fashion. All of this was kind of infuriating since I thought reading and studying literature, which I happened to enjoy even more than learning new vocabulary words, was the point of English Lit. By the end of the year, I hated those weekly worksheets. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t interested in learning new words.

There’s nothing quite like high school to rob you of your love of learning, which is why I can’t help but feel sorry for those poor kids who had to return to school this week. If not for a wonderful program called St. Paul’s Advanced Studies Program, it might have taken years to reignite my love of knowledge and ideas. St. Paul’s is a swanky private school in Concord, N.H., that every summer opens its doors to public school students from throughout New Hampshire and allows them to live in dorms and take classes: Advanced Physics, The Triumph and Tragedy of Ancient Greece, Marine Biology. I took Human Understanding and the Search for Meaning, a mish-mash of religion, psychology and philosophy.

It was the perfect course for me, at the perfect time. It introduced me to new ideas, and to people who were interested in talking about these new ideas. My classmates and I had long, serious conversations about the nature of reality and our different conceptions of God, and although I’m sure we’d all feel deeply embarrassed if forced to listen to a recording of our 17-year-old selves, these are the sorts of things I like to think 17-year-olds everywhere are thinking and talking about. By the time I left campus, I wanted to be a philosopher.

Over Labor Day I got together with some of my St. Paul’s friends; we marveled at the fact that 15 years have passed since we attended St. Paul’s. I won’t say it was the best summer of my life, because I’ve had many great summers. But it was certainly one of the best, and perhaps the summer I’m most nostalgic for, because it was this innocent little period of learning for learning’s sake, before the grind of applying to colleges and the laborious process of choosing a major and finding a job.

I didn’t become a philosopher, partly because I failed Deductive Logic, partly because philosophers don’t really exist anymore, and partly because at some point I started worrying less about the meaning of life and more about whether I could find a job that provided a reasonable salary and decent benefits.

Even so, I’ve never forgotten the lessons of St. Paul’s. Everywhere I go I encounter people and things that stoke my love of knowledge and ideas. Sometimes these encounters are predictable and expected. My friends from St. Paul’s can be counted on to say provocative and interesting things, and last weekend was no exception.

But sometimes these encounters are unexpected. Like when I walk into a Starbucks and see the word deleterious written on a dry erase board and, for a brief moment, I’m filled with glee.

Foss Forward makes a weekly appearance in print, in The Gazette’s Saturday Lifestyles section.