Is it advancing age or the lack of everyday conversations
with multiple people? What, I ask myself
almost daily, is wrong with my word-finding ability? I have encouraged me (in that 2nd
person sort of judgmental voice) to think a moment before I just point to the
object or replace the unfound word with ‘thing’ or ‘stuff’. Pausing then brings on other speech disfluencies
wherein the use of filler words like ‘uh’ or ‘um’, or whole word repetitions
such as ‘we need…we need’, or interjections like ‘like’ disrupt not only one’s
flow of speech but also one’s thinking process.
Psychologists call such lapses tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)
states and emphasize that these TOTs do not necessarily indicate impending
dementia. That’s good news, but what does it indicate? Chances are good that those of us who are
seniors haven’t lost the concept of that which we cannot name. The authors of a book on aging and language
(1) call these aggravating TOT states ‘a glass half empty or a glass half
full.’ These failed retrievals could be
weakened neural connections in a tired old brain, or they might indicate such a
plethora of stored words from all those years of speaking and reading that it
becomes difficult to find the right word in short order.
A search on PubMed suggests multiple hypotheses about why
seniors have more TOTs than juniors. I
choose to go with the word-laden brain hypothesis, allowing us elders to
deliver astounding explanations of meaning even if the word in question remains
elusive.
But here’s an inscrutable cognitive glitch—yesterday I made
one entry in my journal, ‘GNL 18,19’. I
have absolutely no idea what that means.
