Or do I have a head injury?

[resonant]

You know, the longer I spend in post-menopausal word loss --

"if you don't live in a country with an active -- aw, hell, I've lost the word -- not royalty, not monarchy, not oligarchy, the thing where some people have better blood than other people --"

"Aristocracy?"

"Thank you!"

-- the more familiar it looks to me when Ray Kowalski says "the Northwest Areas" or starts the Miranda statement and then loses his place and trails off.

(Due South content in 2022 is thanks to fox, who KNOWS WHY.)

Comments

[resonant]

Yes, it does, and it sucks. But it happens to the spouse, too, so some of it may be just simple age and not menopause at all.

Someone on Table Talk once said she forgot the word "refrigerator" when her baby was small, and said, "You know, the big white box with the cold food in it."

[mekare]

Whoops meant to reply to fox. Sorry.

[china_shop]

But it happens to the spouse, too, so some of it may be just simple age and not menopause at all.

Randomly, in Korean there are two words for menopause: one specifically for woman (or people in female bodies?) and one that's gender neutral.

[resonant]

Interesting. Is Korean more gendered, like Spanish? Or is it just that specific word, like in English "top" and "blouse" imply feminine while "shirt" is neutral?

[china_shop]

Korean is rarely gendered. I think it's more like blouse and shirt. My dictionary also translates one of them as climacterium, which is a word I haven't come across before that should maybe get wider use. ;-)

[isis]

I have been doing this (and, oddly, 'refrigerator' is one of the words frequently subject to this temporary word-loss) ever since well before menopause. My husband marvels that I am a killer crossword solver and yet forget ordinary words fairly often.

[resonant]

I lose "aristocracy" quite a lot, and also, ironically, "articulate."

[rydra_wong]

It also happens as a result of some meds -- SSRIs can do it a bit, but anything that's an anticonvulsant will really eat memory.

One of my meds is an anticonvulsant (being used for anti-anxiety/augmenting antidepressants), so I am VERY familiar with this effect.

(First time I was put on it, I woke up the next morning and had a panic attack because I realized I couldn't remember the name of the drug I was on.)

I should be hitting menopause in the next several years, so I'm rather grimly contemplating what it'll be like with menopausal fuckery stacked on top, and whether being used to working around it already gives me an edge, or whether I'll have no short-term memory or ability to put a sentence together at all.

[resonant]

I would think that having some practice would help!