Doing an Orton
Oct. 14th, 2009 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI have just written a word into my Roget's.
This is ... not something I do. That whole annotating-books thing: every time I follow a recipe from a book, I think maybe I should be noting my own alterations as I go, and I never do. Other people's pages are kind of sacrosanct, apparently, although their recipes are not.
But. Yes. Pen in hand, I made my vandalism.
Thing is, anyone who knows me knows that my memory has always been a problem. Until recently, it's mostly been external to the page: people, mostly. Names and faces. I can remember neither, and never have been able to.
These days, that has very thoroughly extended to a more generalised nominative aphasia, so that authors, book titles, all my more solid ground - stuff I've known all my life - has become unstable and sometimes utterly inaccessible. I hate this, but I get away with it: a wave of the hand, "someone obvious whose name I will remember later," like that.
What I can't get away with? Is losing my vocabulary. All my life, my job has been to find the right word for the occasion. These days, too often I find I can't remember the right word.
Which is why, for the first time in my life, I write with a Roget's at my side. As a prompt, not a source: when I simply can't remember the word I'm groping for, mostly I can track it down through synonyms.
Sometimes, though, I get to the right place and the word isn't there. Today, I lost patience. I have added "tmesis" to Roget's figures of speech. Next time I need it, I'll just have to hope to remember to look it up under "figures of speech" rather than grammatical terms or rhetorical terms or...
This is ... not something I do. That whole annotating-books thing: every time I follow a recipe from a book, I think maybe I should be noting my own alterations as I go, and I never do. Other people's pages are kind of sacrosanct, apparently, although their recipes are not.
But. Yes. Pen in hand, I made my vandalism.
Thing is, anyone who knows me knows that my memory has always been a problem. Until recently, it's mostly been external to the page: people, mostly. Names and faces. I can remember neither, and never have been able to.
These days, that has very thoroughly extended to a more generalised nominative aphasia, so that authors, book titles, all my more solid ground - stuff I've known all my life - has become unstable and sometimes utterly inaccessible. I hate this, but I get away with it: a wave of the hand, "someone obvious whose name I will remember later," like that.
What I can't get away with? Is losing my vocabulary. All my life, my job has been to find the right word for the occasion. These days, too often I find I can't remember the right word.
Which is why, for the first time in my life, I write with a Roget's at my side. As a prompt, not a source: when I simply can't remember the word I'm groping for, mostly I can track it down through synonyms.
Sometimes, though, I get to the right place and the word isn't there. Today, I lost patience. I have added "tmesis" to Roget's figures of speech. Next time I need it, I'll just have to hope to remember to look it up under "figures of speech" rather than grammatical terms or rhetorical terms or...