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ลำดับตอนที่ #29 : Can't remember a word? There's a word for that
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160202-lethologica-when-a-words-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue
9 February 2016
Have you ever tried to unsuccessfully retrieve a word from the
tip of your tongue?
Most of us have experienced it – the usually simple
process of verbalising
a turn of phrase is somehow thwarted
by an annoying mental block. When this happens, often we turn to a glossary of alternatives
to fill the temporary void. Doodad,thingamabob, thingamajig,
whatsit – you’ve probably used one before, or
made up your own version on the spot, to stall for time as you try to fill the void.
The sheer number of these fill-ins highlights a human proclivity for forgetting
the names of things and people, and also highlights the frequency of those ‘on
the tip of my tongue’ experiences. Lethologica is the technical term for this
type of forgetting.
Like many other English terms associated with the mind,
lethologica is a modern word derived from classical Greek. In this case, the
Greek words are lethe (forgetfulness) and logos(word). In Greek mythology, Lethe was also
one of the five rivers of the underworld where the souls of the dead drank to
forget all earthly memories.
The coinage
of this term is popularly attributed
to psychologist Carl Jung in the early 20th Century, but the earliest clear
record is in the 1915 edition of Dorland’s American Illustrated Medical
Dictionary, where lethologica is defined as the ‘inability to remember the
proper word’.
Whatever the precise origin of the coinage, the
importance of memory and forgetting in Jung’s studies of the unconscious, and
in Greek mythology, is echoed in our modern understanding of how memory works
in the brain.
As many of us will intuitively understand, the brain does not
function like a computer, where data is neatly stored away and retrieved at the
press of a button. As psychologist Tom Stafford points out, “our memories are
amazing, but they respond to how many associations we make with new
information, not with how badly we want to remember it”.
Recalling every word in our vocabulary can be tough. For
instance, the Oxford English
Dictionary contains
some 600,000 words, and even these do not represent the totality of the English
vocabulary. The active vocabulary used by an adult in speech and writing is
much less than this, butaccording to David Crystal it often exceeds 50,000 words.*
There will, of course, be many more words that a person
understands but does not use in everyday speech and writing. Words from this
passive vocabulary form a large subset of the words experienced in lethologica.
The words we rarely use, including proper names, are the
ones we often forget. Because our minds are associative and are built out of
patterns of interconnected information, how well we can recall a word may
depend on these patterns or links to other important bits of information.
And so, the many thousands of words stored in our brains
that we rarely use may be harder to recall at short notice, because we have not
yet formed the necessary links to other important bits of information that make
memories easily retrievable.
Lethologica is both the forgetting of a word and the
trace of that word we know is somewhere in our memory. Perhaps it is necessary
for us to drink from the river Lethe to help us temporarily forget the trivial and unnecessary,
so we can prioritise
the information that is important to our lives.
--
Retrieve (v.)
to find and bring back something:
verbalize (V.)
to express ideas,
opinions, or emotions in words:
thwarted
(v.)
to stop something from happening or
someone from doing something:
glossary (n.)
an alphabetical list,
with meanings, of the words or phrasesin
a text that are difficult to
understand:
void (n.)
a feeling of unhappiness because
someone or something is missing:
stall (v.)
If you stall
an event, you delay it or prevent it from
making progress:
proclivity (n.)
the fact that someone likes something or likes to do something, especially something
considered morally wrong:
coinage (n.)
(the inventing of)
a new word or phrase in a language:
attributed (n.)
a quality or characteristic that
someone or something has:
intuitive (n.)
(knowledge from)
an ability to understand or
knowsomething
immediately based on your feelings rather than facts:
trace (n.) origin
trivial (adj.)
having
little value or importance:
prioritise (v.)
to decide which of a group of things are the most importantso that you can deal with them first:
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