50 Times People Failed To Remember What A Simple Thing Is Called But Came Up With A Hilarious Alternative That’s Even Better

As frustrating and annoying as it may be to not be able to find the perfect word as it’s right on the tip of your tongue, it can also lead to some great comedy. Most of us do not come up with creative and innovative synonyms for common words every day, but when we’re faced with the moment of forgetfulness, our imaginations run wild. Why can’t we call cauliflower “ghost broccoli” or sleep “eyelid time”? We still get our point across, and we might even get a laugh out of whoever we’re talking to.

Some of the examples on this list also feature non-native English speakers who had to get creative when they were lacking the vocabulary they needed, which is totally understandable. It takes a brave person to learn another language and practice it with native speakers, so if they have to come up with their own phrases and words to be understood, more power to them. I am a firm believer in the idea that the point, when speaking a foreign language, is to be understood, not perfect. 

If you commonly experience that almost painful “on the tip of your tongue” feeling when trying to come up with a word, you might not know that there is actually a word for that very phenomenon: lethologica. And according to Kendra Cherry at Verywell Mind, this frustrating phenomenon is universal. Studies have found that around 90% of speakers around the world, regardless of their native language, are familiar with this experience. And unfortunately, yet not surprisingly, the frequency of these occurrences tends to increase as we age. Young people tend to have this feeling about once a week, while older adults might experience it as often as every day. It is common for us to remember small amounts of the information we want though, including the first letter of the word we are looking for or how many syllables the word has, for example.

Researchers are not entirely sure why lethologica occurs, but one interesting thing they have learned is that the more time we spend trying to remember a word, the more likely we are to struggle with the same exact word again in the future. "This can be incredibly frustrating—you know you know the word, but you just can't quite get it," says psychologist Karin Humphreys. "And once you have it, it is such a relief that you can't imagine ever forgetting it again. But then you do. So we began thinking about the mechanisms that might underlie this phenomenon."  

In one study, researchers presented participants with questions that they knew, didn’t know, or had the answers right on the tip of their tongues. For the tip-of-the-tongue answers, participants were then put in groups and given either 10 or 30 seconds to come up with responses. This entire process was then repeated two days later. Researchers found that the longer people worked on coming up with an answer the first day, the more likely they were to repeat that same experience two days later. 

“The extra time that people spend trying to dredge up the word is what the researchers describe as ‘incorrect practice’ time,” Karin Humphreys explains. “Instead of learning the correct word, people are learning the mistake itself.” So if your brain is working on overdrive to remember the exact word you want to use, understand that it will actually be better to give your mind some rest. The answer will come to you eventually, or if you really get desperate, you can always Google it.