a great turn of phrase with a freshly minted verb

[firecat]

From peterpayne, the blog of an American living in Japan. He runs the jlist.com web site for Americans who wanna buy Japanese toys, DVDs, porn and stuff.

http://www.peterpayne.net/2005/10/on-stereotypes-how-and-why-words-jump.html

(The first windowful of the entry is OK but if you scroll down it's probably NWS because it includes ads for some of their naughty stuff.)

Anyway, he writes about living in Japan for so long that he has forgotten some English words (for example, "gynecologist"):

It's a strange feeling, not being able to recall a word you know you should know -- you stand there with a dumb look on your face while your brain googles your hippocampus, trying to find the term.

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

That is a wonderful phrase!

I find that if my brain ever does serve up a word for something, it will REFUSE to give me another word for that same thing -- even if the word it served up is not in the language I wanted. It figures it has given me a perfectly fine word and its job is done thank you.

I don't know why, but this happens almost always with nouns, not with any other kind of word. Some are even fairly common words. I have gotten VERY good at improvising: "I was walking through the, the, that thing, you know, rectangular, connects the hallway to our apartment, when you called."

[firecat]

Yeah, same here. To all of that.