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

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I was working English then German then Icelandic. I have a very very tiny smattering of French and that only recently from travelling.

I think this was my nature (not compartmentalizing, which I do not endorse for others) and my first German teacher in middle school. She had seventeen languages, when I knew her, and passed onto me the picture more of relationships than bins.

Icelandic is quite archaic which is where I think there was the disjoint. I felt as if you almost had to think differently to speak it, and my brain couldn't quite make that leap. So there was the quick step, sideways so to speak, to German, and then back.