It’s virtually obligatory for me to talk about this week’s new-to-me word by saying that I know it, and it’s right on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t quite bring it to mind. Haha.
That’s because the word is lethologica, which means the inability to remember a word. Another term for lethologica is tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon or TOT. The latter term probably better describes the experience than just “can’t remember,” because it captures that “I know it, it’s right there” aspect of lethologica. Either way, most of us have experienced lethologica, even without not knowing the word for it, so to speak. There’s a related term lethonomia, which is like lethologica, only it’s specific to (not remembering) names.
When I say most of us, I really mean most of us. According to one article, 90% of all people, including speakers of different languages, experience lethologica.
You might be sad, but perhaps not surprised, to learn that lethologica increases with age. As Michael Erard says in his book Um…, young people experience lethologica about once a week, whereas people in their 60s experience it two to four times per week. It’s not clear why it happens[1] or why it increases with age, but one researcher who was cited by Erard reported, perhaps to our consolation, that people with bigger vocabularies experienced lethologica more. (That was just one study, though.)
In case you’re wondering, lethe is a Greek word for “forgetfulness.” If you’re up on your Greek mythology, you’ll remember that in the underworld (Hades), shades of the dead had to drink from the river Lethe, which made them forget their time on earth. The logica part is from the Greek word logos, meaning “word.” The word lethologica was coined about 100 years ago, although I haven’t found out who coined it. The phenomenon itself was studied by William James and commented on by the likes of Freud.
In a footnote, Erard mentions something fun: there are different phrases in different languages for the phenomenon, most of them involving the mouth. For example, he says that in Korean, the expression is “sparkling at the end of my tongue.” Per Wikipedia’s writeup of the same study that Erard mentions, the idiom among people who use sign language doesn’t involve tongues, but “tip of the finger experiences are reported by signers.”
Moving on to origins. I was wondering recently where the word silk came from, since the word itself doesn’t betray an obvious origin.
It’s a surprisingly old word in English; there are cites that go back to Old English before the year 1000 AD. In Old English the word was sioloc or seoloc. There are similar words in the northern Germanic languages—for example, Old Norse had the word silki. However, there aren’t correlates in the other old Germanic languages, like Old German.
The theory is that Old Norse got the term from a Slavic language, like Old Slavonic šelkŭ; Russian has the word šëlk. The word got to Old Slavonic from Greek, which had a word sērikos. Apparently silk, the word, worked its way north via the Baltic to the Scandinavian countries and through them to England. It’s unclear to me whether silk, the fabric, took a similar journey.
The means of silk production—namely silkworms and the mulberry leaves that they feed on—were smuggled out of China about 500 BC into Byzantium. The word silk probably originated from that area as well. There’s a Chinese word si (“silk”) and a Mongolian word sirkek. Maybe the Greeks were rendering a version of this word. An alternative is that Greek sērikos means “of Seres,” referring to the people from whom they got silk.
Either way, you can see that the Greek word has an R in it: sērikos. Old Norse and Old English had an L, which of course we still have in silk. It’s not entirely clear how the R-to-L change happened. I mention this because of two related words. The first is serge, which is a type of wool. This word also goes back to Greek sērikos, but obviously it took a different path into English, because it still has its R. The second is the word sericulture, which is the word for the cultivation and production of silk. That’s a recent word (1840s), borrowed from French.
I’m beginning to see that names like silk and cotton (an earlier investigation) reflect the history of how these ancient fibers spread around the world. Feels like more investigation is in order.
And a bonus etymological investigation today: Andy Hollandbeck has a cool piece in the Saturday Evening Post this week about how the words pen and pencil, which sure look like they’re related, come from entirely different roots. Check it out!
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] Many things about how language works are mysterious. [^]
Thanks for the call out!