Webbready

I do not know if this is a sign of growing older, or simply growing lazy, but I momentarily, completely forgot a word that I mentally use on a regular basis.

Of course, nearly everyone forgets words, especially ones that have been learned solely for a vocabulary quiz in middle school. People also forget concepts that are attached to words, and of course, forget the precise words to descibe the concepts to which are tied in the mind. In my case, it was the latter.

This word, although one I don’t use often due to its denotative nature, is one that I consciously think about at least once every two weeks. It is a word to which I have attached a part of my heart, and if I had a choice to save the 100 words of the English language, I would save it and cast aside far worthier words such as dun, assuage, and circumambulate (although, no disrespect to Melville, but the last one is a bit overrated).

Although the missing string of letters was one of those words that sat near the front of my grimy verbal tool shelf, it was gone, along with the clean space it left underneath. There was no impression or dust-less shadow cast from its presence. There was in fact, nothing at all but an empty space, as though a thief had broken in my mental shed, stolen the word, then escaped, leaving no evidence of her (or his) presence.

What was worst of all was that unlike a lot of words I have forgotten, I neither forgot that I ever knew it, nor failed to remember the exact term while haunted by the memory of knowing it and the tantalizing whispers of words I associated with it. It was as though the word was never in the English language, and while I knew otherwise, I could not even recall anything associated with it. It was not the case of my usual problem, which is knowing the words to communicate but being unable to communicate the words as expressed in this brain. In this case, I did not know the word at all, and even if someone had told me what it was, I may not have immediately remembered it.

Eventually, I recovered the word, which, fittingly enough, was oxymoron. Now that it has been restored to the pantheon of my vocabulary, I hope I will not forget it again.