I was reading through Witnessing My Own Mental Decay and a few dopers were commenting about not being able to think of a word, even though you can see it in your mind.
I’ve been struggling with this for years, and often find myself finding . . . unique . . . ways to get my point across when this happens. For example, I used the phrase “foot elbow” for “ankle,” and “hand socks” for mittens.
If I’m going to have a brain fart, at least it gave me a good giggle.
What are some words or phrases you have used/heard to replace that elusive word?
My friends were out of town and I had to take their puppy dog to the vet; the dog had a sore that he would not stop licking, making it worse of course. The sore was… well, how to describe the location? It was on his forward left, um, leg (not ‘arm’, surely -?), just above the paw region. The vet looked at it and announced to his assistant nurse, ‘lesion at left wrist.’ A dog’s wrist! Well, sure (and doubly so since that’s what the dog doc called it). (Treated with antibiotics and local antiseptic, mostly all better.)
When my mom was a child her dad told her, if you can’t think of a word, say pump-handle. So this was a thing in my family and I have taught it to a lot of folks as a handy thing to say. Every now and then I run into a stranger who has this in their vocabulary so we have to try to re-trace the path it took from them to me.
As mentioned earlier, I might be halftway senile by now, but I really need to pick a nit with my 3 or so fellow posters:
A foot elbow would be a knee, not an ankle … an ankle would be a foot wrist…
If I don’t recall a person’s name, I normally salute him with: Master, Professor or something “charmingly quirky” … still better than: Hi there, aehh - aehhh …
