Lethologica is the inability to remember a word or name. The term is related to the name of the river Lethe, also known as the River of Oblivion, which in Greek mythology caused those in Hades to to forget their life on earth. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Lethologica”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
We’ve all had the experience of trying to remember a word, having something right on the tip of our tongue and just not being able to reach it.
And that experience made me appreciate this tweet from someone who goes by the name Fisty on Twitter.
She said, “When I was pregnant with my first, I cried one day because I forgot the word banana. I described it to my then-husband. It comes in its own case. It’s yellow.”
I can so relate to that.
Lemon?
Oh, it could have been.
Yeah.
But there’s a word for that.
Do you know the word for this?
No.
Lethologica.
Lethologica.
Yes.
Leth.
I think I know that root.
Yeah.
The river Lethe in Greek mythology was one of the several rivers in Hades.
If you drank from this particular river, also known as the River of Oblivion, you would forget everything.
Oh, yeah.
The River Lethe.
The River of Forgetting is how I learned it, yeah.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Okay.
So you remember.
Yeah, I did remember that one.
Everything else is going, though.
So that’s nice.
Yeah, somebody else tweeted, not in the same league, but I once completely blanked on iceberg lettuce and had to call it Arctic cabbage instead.
My wife has never, ever let me forget this one.
It was over 25 years ago.
Arctic. That’s great. That’s good.
But I’m so fascinated to think about how it is that you sort of go through your mind and try to figure it out.
Like sometimes you know that it starts with a B or it has a certain number of syllables and a certain accent in the word, but you can’t quite figure it out.
Yeah, we know some physiological things about memory that suggest that where we store words isn’t the same place where we store the attributes that belong to those words.
So the different characteristics that the word may connote or denote might be in a different place.
So you can forget a word, but remember things about it the same way that you can forget someone’s name, but remember their face.
Right, right.
If you’ve got a story about forgetting a word and finding a way to work around it, let us know.
877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.
That address is words@waywordradio.org.
