wait let me think

I look at the face. I can't remember the name that goes with it. This is frustrating. Annoying. I study the face. Try harder. No luck. It happens more and more. Old age. Or worse. Or it happens to everybody now and then. But I know that I know the name. To rewind, I know that I know the face, from somewhere. Not just the name. At one time the name was married to the face in my consciousness. So this is not a case of prosopagnosia, which I blogged about years ago. That's when you can't recognize a familiar face, often because of brain damage. This isn't that. I'll call this nomenprosopagnosia. That's a half-witted attempt to coin a useful word for this, based solely on my knowledge of nomen, the Latin word for name. See, four years of Latin is paying off. One of the reasons this annoys me is social. I do not want the embarrassment of asking someone their name if I clearly should know it. Save me from the possibility it's someone I know extremely well, say, a relative. I understand this can happen in high-stress situations, especially at introduction time. That's normal. The fear of that very forgetfulness happening heightens the pressure and the stress -- and the likelihood of a socially fatal error. Spread the net wider and you have a name-pool of friends and colleagues or former friends and former colleagues (some intimate) stretching all the way to mere acquaintances. I am willing to bet that this last category, mere acquaintance, is the most common breeding ground for this nomenloss, this nomenfright. Call it nomenamnesia. A memory trick often works for me. It's alphabetical. A. No, it's not Andrew or Amanda. B. Nope. Not Beth or Bob or Brenda or Billy. etc. Do the same with C, D, et cetera. You might get lucky early in the game. You might say to yourself, "E. Emily! Yes, that's it!" Why does that work? Or how? Do neuroscientists know? Sometimes, though, that little trick doesn't work, not even after you've gone through the alphabet, perhaps twice. And then you're back to Square One. No-Nomenland.