How One MisRemembers...

OK, y’all…
In his short story “the Langoliers”, Stephen King writes about a pilot trying to remember his ex-wife’s perfume’s name. “Lawnboy?..Lifebuoy? No, that’s soap…Lovebite? Lovelorn? Loveboy? That’s closer…”

and the bloody miserable stuff turns out to be named “l’Envoi”!

IS THAT HOW YOU MIS-REMEMBER THINGS?? ::he asks, with great irritation::

Aw, c’mon! I remember when I was in High School and my sister called to say she’d be staying over at a friend’s house and told me the name. Naturally, I forgot, until my parents came home and asked where she was. “Friend’s house…Lisa…Sarotoff? Sarnutov?” It was “Sarwinsky”.

Or…trying to remember the name of a long-forgotten childhood cartoon character: “I think her name was, uh, ‘Suzy Woozy’?” Nope, “Pixie Dixie”.

Or…my neighbor’s favorite term for a ‘doohickey’ was, uh,…“deely bobber”? No, that wasn’t it…let me think…“doozis whutzy”? Naaaw…OH YEAH, “veeble fetzer”!!!

Now, back to King’s pilot. He would have been running through and discarding possibilities like “d’Enclave”, “j’Adore”, “l’Amour”, perhaps, possibly even “La Envy” but, seriously folks, “lawnboy”? “Love boy”?

Tell me, does my mind mis-remember things by patterns more similar to how yours does, or is the Author on target and my mind works horribly weirdly?

Some people remember things by sound rather than by visuals - for example, l’envoi is pronounced like “lawn voy” so it follows that they might remember “lawn boy.”

“Samsonite! I knew it started with an ‘S’”!

There is a scene in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels that plays that hilariously. Steve Martin has been jailed and is trying to remember Michael Caine’s character’s name, Lawrence Jaimieson.

Lawn voy? Try lawn(nasalised “n”) VWAH.