Okay, the first thing to go is language skills, I guess.
As I’m a writer and editor, this is bad.
Exhibit A.
I’m arguing with an author about his use of “somewhat unique to the XXX industry . . .” my argument being based on the definition, admittedly eroding, of unique. He explains why it’s only “somewhat” unique to that industry. Now, I know that there is some more elegant phrase that would palliate him and satisfy me and, as an editor, it should fall freely from my lips (or my pencil), but for some reason it doesn’t. So “somewhat unique” it remains since authors always have the last word.
Two weeks later as I’m falling asleep I think: "Somewhat peculiar to the XXX industry! That’s what I should have said. Somewhat peculiar." But at this point the book is out of my hands and in the print shop and it’s too late. Way too late.
Exhibit B.
Trying to explain to my friend why I didn’t pick up my cell phone, which is a new one, while I was driving, I grope for a phrase. (The phrase is not “I don’t answer the cell phone when I’m driving on an icy road, in the dark,” because in fact I usually do, or at least I did with the old one.) No, the phrase I am looking for has something to do, I’m pretty sure, with a word like extinct. Not that word exactly, but one like it. Sort of. I keep trying it out. “This phone is not . . . extinct. Extant?” All wrong. “That thing, you know, that animals do, without anybody telling them?” Eventually I come up with instinct, which is not exactly like extinct but not its opposite, either–and that’s still not the word. And my friend thinks I’ve lost it and could be right.
So we go on to other things and then finally the word comes to me. The word I was groping for, there? “Intuitive.” The new phone is not intuitive; can’t just pick it up and squeeze it in order to answer a call. Yeah, that’s real similar to “extinct.”
Exhibit C.
Driving home from work (again; always) I hear a song on the radio, a song I’ve loved for years, possibly decades. Being in a post-holiday acquisitive mood I decide that now is the time to figure out who did that song and to acquire it for my collection so I won’t be dependent on the whims of DJs. And speaking of the whims of DJs, the ones on the stations I listen to rarely give the artist or the name of the song (although they’ll tell you all about what was going on in the artist’s life at the time the song was written, and what kind of guitar he played, and stuff like that, if you know who the guy was in the first place I’m sure that’s very helpful). The problem here is that what I love about the song is the melody and the guitar picking, and the lyrics have never been the point, so I’ve never, in all these years, actually listened to them. They have never registered. Not one of them. Not a single word.
So, now I am listening with the intent of picking out one key phrase so I can look it up and figure out the name, and here it comes, I’m listening. Okay, got it. Six words. I can remember that. I repeat them out loud.
Hey, I can remember six words until I get home. Or at least until I get to a stoplight where I can write the six words down. It’s only six words!
Halfway through the next song I realize that, nope, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember a six-word catchy phrase of a song I just heard. I’ve forgotten it. I don’t remember even ONE key word of that phrase, whatever it was.
While I’m kicking myself for this, I miss my exit.
(Maybe I was always like this and I just don’t remember.)
But I still got my sense of humor!