You know as you get older you start losing your words; it can be very unfunny for the person concerned when it starts to become critical and they seem to have a lot of their other faculties; nouns are the first to go. Fortunately my other half and I are only a little way down that road. He has a lot more trouble with it than I do, but this evening I needed an avocado. Could I do it?

I know it begins with A. Fingers start waggling in the air, hands flapping. First thing that springs to mind is... Agamemnon. I know it isn't that. Artichoke. Arbuthnot.

Eventually Oh grrr, means a lawyer... avocado.

The long way round. I shall think of them as Agamemnons from now on

Ha ha, I can sympathise.

You get around it by calling everything a thingammy, or a whatsit and then look offended when no one knows what you're talking about...

Everything in our house is a doobry, or if others of our friends are involved in the conversation, umbrella. Even people are called umbrella when their name eludes us.

I had a horrible period of stress when I couldn't remember the name of anything and I was only in my late 20's. I use to be frantic to keep going through the blockages, so I would have to be descriptive - like "can you empty the... thing that's like an oven, but with water in it."

I lose my nouns in a big way (unable to have a coherent conversation) whenever I get a migraine.

Here is a thread I can relate to, all too well.

And then there are those moments of total clarity when a name or a word pops into your head three weeks later. I once knew an elderly gentleman called Blechynden, and I could never remember his name, until I wrote it down in my diary. Now, twenty years later when I no longer need it, I can recall his name easily.

I teach two little boys who are avid readers, and they really enjoy testing me with words they have discovered. We now have 'word of the week' where I give each of them a word to look up. It's great fun and it keeps me on my toes.

Doofer is a nice substitute for illusive words.

Meanwhile, has anyone got a cure for those moments when you open the fridge and can't remember why?

No, but I know they're related to those moments when you go upstairs and can't remember what it was you were going to do when you got there.

I have moments of losing nouns completely. I also find that the wrong noun comes out of my mouth if I've been distracted. If someone asks me where the milk is and I've just noticed that the windows need cleaning, I'll start to tell them that the milk in the fridge but what comes out of my mouth is that it's in the window.

Ohhhh YES!!!!! Only too well.

However I developed a highly trained ear for this with my Mother. She had dementia and strokes for nearly 20 years and one of the first things to go were her nouns. I mastered the art of guessing what she was trying to say and could at least narrow it down if not find the actual word itself within a few seconds.

Now I play this game with myself Either I can offer up an alternative word so smoothly that nobody notices or I change 'the word' to a short description of the word and get away with it. Or the standard fall back of making a joke

However sometimes I lose it completely and then my husband gets really angry with me - that's infuriating because he's a fair bit older than me and never loses HIS words!!!!


Don't you love ageing

My mother has had this problem for a LONG time but I'm now finding that it's creeping up on me. We often have phone calls where neither of us can think of the right words - and the usual hand signals just don't seem to help...

My recent development on this is to come out with a completely inappropriate word, that just happens to start with same letter/sound - the results usually surprise me even more than the person I'm with...

W

It's even worse when you use two languages on a daily basis. I end up speaking sentences constructed with English grammar but sprinkled with French nouns or the French for thigummy which is a lovely little word - truc! (I have not forgotten the inverted commas - I have given them up - not for Lent but because they come out as question marks and that can make my posts a bit odd to read.)

The rule is that if in doubt, you're probably looking for your glasses.

It used to amuse us when our boys were growing up to watch them try to find the word for what they wanted, but not know it. We still have a laugh about the occassion when our eldest eventually said - frying pan spoon - for spatula. It has been that in our household ever since.

Now, my wife and I are definitely part of this club. People's names, never a strong point of mine in the first place, are very definitely hit and miss. I hadn't noticed that it was nouns that tend to disappear, but it is true. It is much easier to describe actions and descriptors with alternatives that readily come to mind very quickly, but a spatula is a spatula is a spatula (or frying pan spoon).

^^^^ This

I am so happy to find you all in this state. I am too - it tends to come and go, and the cure I've found is doing sudoku puzzles. How that works I'm not sure! It's annoying especially as the husband doesn't have this problem.

The other thing I have utmost difficulty with is remembering the date - I put it in my pupils' notebooks. By the end of about 4 pupils, I've managed to remember it - but they've got used to me now and just laugh when i ask them the date.

I think we should start the "Lost nouns club"! I'll be a founder member.

Same here - though it usually takes me more than four pupils! And maggiemay is absolutely right - my partner and I spend half our lives looking for our glasses!

I'm glad I'm not the only one. Like Aquarelle, the word often comes to me in a different language to English which is so frustrating!

...which are on your head - or round your neck!

I have a similar problem with names. My mother-in-law frequently phones up and asks to speak to M - my husband's brother and she calls him by my husband's name. I put this down to her being ninety but now that I have two sons, I do actually confuse their names quite a bit too - sometimes my brother and the cat's name even get into the mix!

spot on - or rather, I was going to say 'on the end of my nose'.

Actually, I do realise pretty quickly these days that if I can actually SEE into the fridge ......... !

I was just reading this thread....and then walked into the larder to pick up a tin of soup for lunch...... and walked out with a tin of............
......................................................... dog food.

I don't know about nouns- I'm losing my lunch.....

Talking of dogs... I had a dog whose nickname was Doof. (Doofer, Doofie, Doofter depending on context)


.... because he liked fooD ... a lot

And when we had a surfeit of cats I was apparantly heard asking one of them "What's your name?"

My brother has relatively recently separated from his wife; and this Xmas brought his girlfriend with him to visit the family. Each of my parents called her by the ex-wife's name (only once each though!)
But then my father, when he did this, said he frequently confuses the names of his two sons (who are 25 years apart in age, and one lives with him and the other lives at the other end of the country). He then somewhat sheepishly admitted that he does on occasion call his (second) wife by my mother's name (his first wife).

Mind you, my mother's as bad with remembering who eats what. I remember as a child going out to eat at Pizza Hut and my mother quizzing my step-father about whether he ate tomato ("yes I do, it's [first husbad] who doesn't") or beetroot ("yes I do, it's your boss who doesn't")

My late mother-in-law frequently mixed up the names of her sons (three of them, each 18 months apart) and also with her dog It took her ages to get my name, more than once she called me Alison - the funny bit here is that neither my husband nor his brother can think of anyone called Alison who has ever been anything to the family (e.g. an ex-girlfriend) She called me that when we first me - though I had been warned. She'd also referred to me as Alison more than once on the phone beforehand, leading my husband (who wasn't my husband then!) to say "If you're not going to call her the right name, don't call her anything at all!")

You don't have to be old to lose your nouns.

I went to our local railway station aged about fifteen, ready to embark on a long planned day trip. There was a short queue in the booking hall, but by the time I got to the ticket desk I had completely forgotten where I wanted to go to! I knew exactly where I was going and why, but I just couldn't remember the station that I wanted a ticket for!

SB

Following on from Maizie's family mix up with names, I can only say that my husband and his brother were most considerate to their mother. My sister in law and I are both Susans! except that she's abbreviated to Sue and I'm not - naturally mother-in-law gets us the wrong way round, but we both answer to it.

However, all is not complete harmony. A few years ago I wondered why I was being treated to rhubarb crumble on every visit - I dislike rhubarb fairly passionately - it makes my teeth itch. However, being a good daughter-in-law I ate a small portion each time. Light dawned one day, when my sister-in-law said that she was being treated to things with ginger in fairly often. I like ginger and she doesn't. So mother-in-law had got us both mixed up in the end.