On the tip of my tongue...

Don’t you find that frustrating? And no I don’t mean somebody starting their blog with a question like that and not explaining what ‘that’ is.
I mean more like when you are searching for a word and you kinda know in your head what word you are looking for but your brain has gone out to lunch so it just keeps throwing up different words – none of which are ever the word you want.
But that’s the thing with words, there are so damn many of them.
In fact I’m beginning to wonder now if there shouldn’t be some sort of a campaign to get rid of words that are not used too much any more.
Words like lethologica for instance – when’s the last time you used that in a sentence?
Come to think of it we could possibly also do away with words that are too hard to spell or too hard to pronounce as well.
Oh yeah and what about those big words with the obscure meanings that people will sometimes throw into a sentence to try and impress others with their wide ranging vocabulary? (Like lethologica for instance.) Umm, maybe we should get rid of some of those too.
I say all this because recently, well I was looking for a word to use in a sentence and, well, try as I might I just couldn’t think of the right word.
It was, as they say, on the tip of my tongue. Except well in my case it wasn’t and I did actually even stand in front of a mirror at one stage to check, when the frustration at not being able to find the word had got to a certain level.
In the end I just used another word, that kinda had the same meaning, but which just wasn’t exactly the word that I’d been looking for.
And then it hit me. I mean if there were less of these other words that kinda meant what you were trying to say out there, well it would surely increase the chances of you actually trying to remember the word you were looking for.
And if you don’t believe me, how’s about this then? We all know what a shoe is don’t we...yet when I looked up shoe in the thesaurus I got 68 more words for shoe!
Funnily enough I wasn’t greeted with the same barrage of suggestions when I looked up thesaurus in the thesaurus.
What a piece of brilliant marketing – a book that has different words for thousands of words but doesn’t have a different word for itself!
All this scrambling around for words also brought back a memory from many years ago when I attended a lecture given by some crazy professor on a subject called critical practice.
From what I can recall this guy seemed to be suggesting that things could be interpreted any damn way you wanted and most things could mean anything at all.
A table, he said, could be interpreted in different ways and he insisted that our thinking was all conditioned by the words we used.
What, he asked, if a table wasn’t called a table? What if it were called, say an apple instead? Or indeed what if a table was called something else like a Schnarf?
That isn’t a real word by the way and it was probably around then that I left the lecture thinking this guy was just babbling on, mixing up words and spewing out any old nonsense.
It wasn’t until years later that it finally dawned on me....umm, you know there might be a blog in that...
(P.S. – I was going to explain the meaning of lethologica but I thought you’d have more fun looking it up!)