OH, THOSE CONFOUNDING MOMENTS OF . . . UH . . .

Saturday, December 20, 2003

We had a pot luck lunch at work last week to celebrate the season, and a colleague brought some tasty hors d'oeuvres he called "sauerkraut balls." To compliments, he responded by explaining what a lot of work they are -- mix the sauerkraut and corned beef and ham and flavorings, chill the mixture so it isn't too sticky to shape, roll it into balls, coat with bread crumbs and deep fry.

Oh, that's familiar. I used to make a recipe something like that years ago, when my husband and I spent summers with his parents in Chautauqua, New York. But we used chicken, not ham (and no sauerkraut). My mother-in-law called them chicken . . . now, what exactly did she call them? Chicken what? I couldn't remember.

This sudden hole in one's memory where a word used to be is sometimes called a "senior moment" but I suspect that is because when you get to be a "senior" -- I'm 64 -- you really start to worry about them. Younger people experience them too.

My daughter-in-law Jesse Hajicek, who is certainly not a senior, tells me this happens to her so often she has a standard technique, which is to replace the temporarily missing word with a fanciful and elaborate definition. As she told me in an e-mail this week, she has said, for example, " 'Please pass the white crystalline substance which is often paired with pepper' (yes, I actually forgot the word salt)."

It just sounds like Jesse being amusing and creative, which she is. "Where did we put the little putty-colored wire-doored plastic house of kitty anguish?"

I would personalize this still further with the name of her elderly cat, the one who gets to ride in the cat carrier most often, except of course I can't remember it right now.

I recall once, when I was telling someone about the Guernsey cattle raised by a friend from Chautauqua days, and especially Oberlin, his prize . . . his prize something. And I suddenly couldn't remember the word for intact male animal of the bovine species. I could readily summon up a list of cattle words -- cow, heifer, calf, steer, ox -- and an intersecting column of breeding males for farm species -- stallion, ram, boar -- but where they intersected was a blank.

Fortunately I was at a party for the University of Minnesota linguistics department, so I could stop and say, "guess what I just noticed?" and that was a more interesting topic anyway. By the time I'd finished explaining, "bull" had popped into its usual space.

Someone at the party explained one way linguists have studied the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon, which you would think would be too unpredictable to study. They sit a bunch of volunteers down in an auditorium, and show them a pair of slides, the first for only a fleeting instant, and the second that remains on screen. Anyone who experiences the tip-of-the-tongue feeling about what was on the first slide raises a hand and the researchers debrief them about what they do to try to recover the missing word.

That sounds about right. When this happens to me, it frets at the edge of consciousness while I try to come up with related words. The first one for the chicken thingies was "fritters." I reviewed in my mind what you do when you make fritters, which is not very similar to the sauerkraut-ball recipe, but it primed a lot of cooking terms.

The next word that popped up was "chitlins." Obviously that's not even close, but because the meaning is more distant it suggested there was something about the sound that might be closer.

Exactly what is "closer" about certain sounds isn't clear, but it may be shared. Years ago, my husband blanked on the name of the Minnesota city near Saint. John's University. I couldn't remember it either, but his first stab was "Eau Claire" (which is actually in Wisconsin) and that was close enough for me to realize we both meant St. Cloud.

Crossword puzzles and trivia contests are a rich source of words you almost remember. Who wrote Waiting for Godot? Bertholdt Brecht. No, turns out it was Samuel Beckett. Who was the pioneering publisher of Amazing magazine? Rudi Gernreich. No, he invented the topless bathing suit. It was Hugo Gernsbach.

With crossword puzzles, there is often a brief but perceptible, moment where I know I have found the word, but I don't yet know what it is. That happened with the chicken thingies, about three days later.

Aha! Chicken croquettes!

And with that, happy holidays to all.