Have you ever tried to use a particular word that fits a situation perfectly? You are aware that you know this word, but just cannot retrieve it for the present use?
Most of us have experienced it, and usually when this happens, we often to alternatives to fill the temporary void. The sheer number of these fill-ins highlights a human tendency to forget the names of things and people.
Lethologica is the name for this term, which 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.
As many of us already know, the brain does not function like a computer – where data is neatly stored away and retrieved at the press of a button. Instead, our memories, though amazing, respond to how many associations we make with new information, not with how badly we want to remember it, according to psychologist Tom Strafford.
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, and for the really eloquent may be in excess of 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.
Hence, 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 hence, both the forgetting of a word, the trace of which we know is somewhere in our memory.
