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 2^nd 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.

DenverDoc

1. “Changing Minds:  How Aging Affects Language and How Language Affects Aging,” authors Roger Kreuz and Richard Roberts