In human speech, words emerge in a stream of unpredictability. This is the natural way. We start with a word, then another one emerges, and all the time we are thinking of what idea we want to express, and we are not thinking about the words we need to express our idea. Meaning drives which words are chosen and it is all done without our conscious awareness.
Language is thus ever expansive, always moving to new things. It cannot therefore be reduced in order to teach a specific word. When we do that, we destroy the free nature of language. When the natural expression of interesting ideas is thus reduced, our language experience with each other becomes dull.
We capture the imaginations of our students with odd hooks/twists of ideas and with phantasmagorical images/portraiture, not with words that we pick out of some list somewhere, words that we “have to teach”. That doesn’t get the job done.