The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said

I know so many snatches of poetry. I know many quotes, sometimes even being able to attribute them to the proper person. I know factoids aka, Mom’s Fast Facts. I sometimes can recite whole poems or long pages of books.

Then I’m struck with wanting that perfect word. You know … that one. The one that is …. right over there, the one I can’t think of right now. I hate when that happens to me.

I’m going along merrily recounting a story and run smack into a wall that I was totally unaware of. Boom. I can’t come up with the word. I’m used to that with names. I am horrible with names. I watched my parents struggle with names that began with the same letter, and so I named my own sons with completely different names. And then I call them the dog’s name.

That I know is simply confusion, talking too fast, common misassignment. But when I’m searching for the word and can’t find it at all … god knows what that is. Old age? But I’ve been doing it for a very long time. I just want that elusive something that is just outside my grasp. I know it’s there, but it should be here. I just can’t quite get hold of it.

But luckily, or unluckily, I have a vast vocabulary and when it happens I usually go for the runner-up in the word contest. I simply do with the second best word. Sometimes within seconds, I can finally capture the wayward word. When I’m writing, I can go back and put in the BEST word instead of using that substandard one. When I’m speaking, well, tough luck listener, you are stuck with a less than scintillating narrative.

I would love to see how a mind works when it is frantically searching for that just exactly perfect word that is so close and yet so far. There are brain imaging techniques that watch which part of the brain is working how hard when given a list of words. Men’s brains access different areas and in different forces than the same words inside a woman’s brain. Not all words, of course. But the word “infant” lights up different portions of the brain according to gender. Stuff like that.

What I want to see is the firestorm that is waging inside my head when I’m trying to come with a word like “consternate” and can only find “confuse.” I don’t even want to see what happens if I call my son LC. I know that I am at best consternated and confused when I’m looking for that perfect word. Sometimes, after finally getting the perfect word, I find that it wasn’t really perfect after all, but still misses the point by a slight shade.

I am very fortunate to be working with English. It is a language completely full of words. The OED has something like one-quarter million words listed. And then there are the technical and jargon words, not to mention slang. English borrows, perhaps steals, words from other languages with alacrity. Possibly we even steal them en masse.

Since there are so many words at my disposal, one would think that I could just go along on my merry way and make the best of the great thing. Instead, I’m concerned, no, maybe I’m just anxious, I’m not up to troubled, but I do care about using the right one.