I had no trouble remembering “Acme,” although I initially thought of “Ajax.” Don’t know why…
I’m embarrassed to confess this weakness. After all, words are my thing. Something I’m good at. I’m not much of a basketball player or a musician, and for that matter there are plenty of wordsmiths who put me in the shade, who utterly dazzle. And not just Shakespeare or Twain, although I find it hard to believe they were merely human.
But years and decades and more of everyday use have shown I’m better at words than, I don’t know, 90-plus percent of the population. However badly this blog post is written, I know that is generally the case. It’s been tested too many times.
It’s not much, but it’s something. And it bothers me to be losing it to any degree. So I hesitate to share the fact, but I’ve got this journalistic urge to document this thing frankly, so…
Anyway, it’s a thing I hate to see slip away at all. I’ve noticed my writing isn’t all that great since the stroke, especially on “fatigue” days (hence my self-conscious apology above for this post), but that’s a subtle, subjective thing that comes and goes. Not too worried about it, yet.
Not being able to think of a particular word is more definite. Feels more like a landmark — look what you’ve come to, dummy.
Usually, it’s not so bad. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking with someone at ADCO about a press release I was putting together, and I couldn’t think of the word the folks at ADCO use for that blurb at the end telling about the company. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the structure of press releases, but at the end you’ll have a line that says, “About Acme Corporation,” and it will be followed by a paragraph of basic stuff you’d want the recipient to know about the company but didn’t mention in the main body of the release. (Like, “Acme is a worldwide leader in producing a stunningly diverse assortment of products that are not normally associated with killing or capturing roadrunners, but can be used for that purpose.”)
I thought of it as a “footer,” which is more of a newspaper word, one applied to those italic things at the end of a story that say things like, Staff writers Joe Blow and Susie Q also contributed to this report.
I confessed my problem, using the word “footer” to explain, and after a second Lora said, “boilerplate?”
YES! Boilerplate. Why was that hard?
Anyway, I’ve had a number of “boilerplate” moments lately. And I think they’re because of the stroke, but I don’t know that.
And occasionally, they’re way simpler, far less esoteric. For instance… there was this theme music to a movie that I had heard a couple of times recently, and something on the radio reminded me of it — something extremely repetitive, I suppose — and I wanted to mention to my wife that it had recently occurred to me that this song was the MOST mindlessly repetitive in human history.
And for a second I couldn’t think of the name of the song, which didn’t bother me. What got me was that I couldn’t think of the name of the movie. And this was bad not just because it’s an EXTREMELY popular movie that is currently back in the news, or because I’m kind of a movie buff. It’s because I knew the words were extremely simple. I knew exactly what they referred to, since they combine to form the nickname of a real-life institution that looms large in naval culture — at least, in a certain part of the Navy. (Not the part I grew up in, thank goodness — more Bob Amundson’s part.) I could remember scenes in which the name was used in dialogue in the movie, and how important it was to those scenes. I could see the captain telling the two heroes that he was sending them there, even though he didn’t want to…
Yes, I was trying to think of “Top Gun” (and that maddening song, “Danger Zone.” Really. Go read the lyrics, all the way through. Listen to the last half of it.). It came to me within, I suppose, a minute. But it was an excessively long minute.
A minute, however, is better than several days.
Twice this morning, I tried to think of a word that I’ve been trying to retrieve for, I don’t know, two or three days. I didn’t especially need it. It wasn’t important to anything I wanted to say. But it really bugged me that I couldn’t think of it.
At one point today, I was responding to a comment in which someone described his post-stroke symptoms, and it motivated me to mention how fortunate I was that most of mine had gone away. I no longer have a problem looking down. Of course, I still have this fatigue thing. And there’s the forgetting-words thing. And then I tried to trick myself by just going ahead and typing the word I’d been having trouble with… and it didn’t work. I had to admit, “Like… dang. There’s a word I haven’t been able to think of for days, and I thought if I just snuck up on it, it would come. It didn’t…”
At that point, I went out to my wife who was reading on the deck. I told her I couldn’t remember this word. It wasn’t something common like “top gun,” but it was common enough in political speech that I should have no trouble with it. Or at least it had been, within our lifetimes.
I said it was a word feminists had popularized in the ’70s — a time when we were both in college, and then I was starting my career as a journalist, and this word was huge back then. It had been colored by that use to the point that people started using it only in that sense, rather than in a broader way.
The word referred to being too loyal, or attached to, some group to which one belonged. To one’s country, or something else with which one identifies. It was about thinking too highly of that identity, and having a tendency to look down upon people who didn’t share it.
I said it had come to be sort of synonymous with “sexist” because of the way it was used in that period. People might use it this way: They might say, “(blank) pig” instead of “sexist pig.”
I also said, erroneously, that I thought it was very close to some other, far more common, word, only being different by a letter or two. (There were two other things I was thinking but didn’t share with her. I thought it was from French, which was more or less correct. I was also thinking it started with a J, which was wrong. I kept straining to see the word, and I was seeing something that looked kind of like “jeune.” I don’t speak French, but I knew that meant “young.” I also knew it wasn’t the word, but I erroneously thought it was close. Maybe I was reaching for “jejune,” but I don’t know why because I’ve never used that one.)
My wife couldn’t think of it, either. I went back in, still trying to come up with it. I had thought about Googling for it, but I knew that would be tricky. Finally, I Googled “word that people use to mean sexist.” The first link I got was a page that offered offered 25 synonyms including “bigoted,” “discriminatory,” “dogmatic” (dogmatic? really?), “intolerant” “intransigent,” “one-sided,” “opinionated,” “racist,” “xenophobic”…
Completely useless. I’ve always wondered why some people find a thesaurus helpful. I never have. But then, I usually use fairly common words, and I think of them myself (I’ve always sort of thought that if I couldn’t, they were too obscure to use)…
I scrolled down on the page, though, and saw a separate list of words associated with “bigot,” and there the stupid word was: chauvinist.
YES! No J, but definitely French! And definitely the word I’d been looking for.
I went and told my wife. She objected that it wasn’t used to mean “sexist,” and that the common usage she remembered was quite correct: Back in the ’70s, a lot of people said “male chauvinist.”
Yes, I agreed, that was correct, because it explained the type of chauvinism being described. But I’m sure that during that period, chauvinism got to be so tied up with the male variety in a lot of people’s heads that it became common to use it for “sexist.” And when I tried to proved it by Googling “chauvinist pig” and telling it to leave out “male,” I got 284,000 responses. Millions would be better, but I think it backs up my memory.
Which is good. Because a memory that can’t remember “chauvinist” is a memory worth worrying about, if you value words.
I could be wrong about that, of course, but I’m not wrong about “top gun”…
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I share your problem of remembering words and names. I usually blame it on old age but then, I did have a stroke back in the day. Whatever the cause, it can drive you bat shit crazy. Usually if I can get something else on my mind, it will come to me, but sometimes it takes days. Anyhow, I share your frustration.
Thanks for sharing, Judy!
I’m also having trouble with names. But I always have trouble with names. And it’s not an age thing, either — I’ve always been bad with names. I can’t tell whether this is really worse than usual…
yeah,well.I can’t remember when you weren’t retarded/challenged
If I make it through today,
I’ll know tomorrow not to put my feelings out on display.
I’ll put the cobwebs back in place.
I’ve never been too good with names,
But I remember faces…
There’s an old adage that goes: Don’t be concerned if you can’t remember where you put your car keys. However, if you forget what the keys are FOR, then you may have a problem.
I think we all have these Rick Perry ‘oops’ moments after we turn 60. May have nothing to do with the stroke. I know you love working but if this continues it may be time to consider retirement.
The upside is now you will be really good at playing ‘taboo’. Of course, you probably were before as well, but it seems you probably won’t slip up and give away the target word by accident in your current state. I’m impressed with how detailed and varied your associations to target words you can’t remember are. I occasionally have this issue and I’ve come to think it is just easier in the moment, so that I don’t lose my train of thought and the bigger picture of what I’m saying, to just throw in a phrase to describe the word when I can’t get the word itself and just keep going. In the interest of communication, if you can describe the word so well, you can just keep going and still get the point across. But it is annoying to know the word is there and not be able to get it. I very much get that.
Incidentally ‘ch’ and ‘J’ are cognates phonemically – voiced and unvoiced versions of the same thing (palatal affricates) – but then in that word the ‘ch’ is not saying a traditional ‘ch’ sound but the deaffricated version – ‘sh’. Still they are all kind of related. Maybe you know this at some level.
I’m not familiar with “Taboo.” But if it has to do with obsessing about words, maybe I should avoid it.
Yes, I obsess about words. I obsess about facts, too, although not as much as about words.
This post, which so far my readers have avoided as though it were coated with coronavirus particles, is an example of how I obsess.
It’s what made me very good at being an editor — and rather intolerant of editors and reporters who did NOT obsess over the facts the way I did.
Still, they obsessed plenty, in their own way. Journalists to that. People who have never done this stuff for a living have no idea…
I’m not familiar with “Taboo.” But if it has to do with obsessing about words, maybe I should avoid it.
Yes, I obsess about words. I obsess about facts, too, although maybe not as much as about words.
This post, which so far my readers have avoided as though it were coated with coronavirus particles, is an example of how I obsess.
It’s what made me very good at being an editor — and rather intolerant of editors and reporters who did NOT obsess over the facts the way I did.
Still, they obsessed plenty, in their own way. Journalists do that. People who have never done this stuff for a living have no idea…
Taboo is a great game. You have teams of two people, so six people make three teams. Each team goes in turn. On your turn, one person is the “guesser”, and the other person is the “clue giver”. The Clue Giver has a card with the word they are trying to get the other person to say. Also on the card are four or five closely related words you CANNOT say.
For instance, your word might be “baseball”. However, you can’t say “field”; “hit” “game” “stadium”; or “catch”. You also can’t say any part of the actual word, so “base” and “ball” are also prohibited. So you try to get your partner to say “baseball” without using those words. It works well if you can get creative, and know your partner’s area of knowledge.
Accordingly, if you were my partner, I would say “Hank Aaron played…” and you would likely guess “baseball”. Then we go to the next card. One point for each correct card and one negative point for any time you use a prohibited word. One person from the other team is the enforcer of the prohibited words.
Took forever to think of “anecdotally”. As Judy pointed out if I twist my brain into the shape of a pretzel I’ll never think of it. Go on to something else then it pops into my head.
Well, this news should make remembering the word a little easier for a time:
That’s where the word came from — a guy’s name….