The Memory of Words Past

Mixed media painting after a Ute petroglyph
by Phillip Hoyle

This little story could be of interest only to writers or to students of aging. Here’s how it goes. 

So at age sixty-four I have just finished writing a novel, a book of over 50,000 words. I have been pondering the future of the manuscript and in so doing decided to ask several people to read it to see if it makes sense, holds together, bores, or entertains. While waiting for their responses, I’m trying to plan creative ways to reread it in an attempt to make sure I will not send a possible agent or publisher a work that seems unpromising. A tactic I learned from my daughter-in-law Heather is to mark all “to be” words, changing them into something active unless they present no alternative. My own idea is to check the use of all, uh, what’s the word? Uh, that kind of word I have sometimes had trouble with. This is awful. Not only do I have trouble selecting the right one of these words; I cannot even think of the name for the type of word. Am I losing my mind? That’s not beyond possibility given my age.

I recall after doing so well in freshman written composition 101 and sophomore and junior ancient Greek, I went for years without naming parts of speech or grammatical stuff even though I was writing on a regular basis. When I entered graduate school I was surprised that I didn’t have facility with that vocabulary anymore. When I heard my professors talking about word use, metaphor, participles, and the like, I realized I’d have to review things I learned in junior high. And now again, after years of writing daily, I cannot think of some simple grammatical concept I studied in Latin, Spanish, Greek, French, and English! 

Perhaps I can discover my lost word if I begin writing about words. So I have noun and verb, subject and predicate. I know objects, direct and indirect. There are past and present participles which are verbal adjectives and gerunds which are verbal nouns. Of course I know conjunctions: how could I ever forget PBS’s “Conjunction junction, what’s your function?” But I have forgotten the elusive word that started all this. What is the term for words such as over, under, above, through, and behind? What is the word sometimes connected with places, actions, characters, things, and so forth. I want it to begin with the letter c or p but don’t remember. I do recall how the selection of the correct word has sometimes seemed a challenge. I can misuse them, thus my impulse to have Heather check them in my manuscript, but I can’t ask her to since I don’t recall the word. It would be embarrassing since she teaches writing. I have to get it. Through, beyond, beside and so forth are examples, but I cannot recall the grammatical name. 

I had a problem with them in Greek; back then I believe it was because I couldn’t recall the right Greek word that in English often serves as a prefix, for example “meta.” Did it mean through or after? See, it still confuses me. I‘ll work at this and will probably go upstairs to read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Surely that old standby will instruct me. Pronouns, personal pronouns, articles, modifier, adjective, adverb…. Still the word I’m searching for doesn’t arise from the grammatical murk of my befuddled brain, but I’ll keep at my memory quest.

The words describe the relative position of things. There it is, finally: position; preposition. I never thought of this, but the word describes its function. It’s the word at the beginning of a phrase (of course, a prepositional phrase) that tells the relative position of the expression it modifies. I was pretty sure I could recall this word, my attempt stimulating the bank of grammatical words and giving synapses time to connect. I like that. Somehow the recollection of this word seems hopeful, as in: I still know what I know; I still have a functioning brain. 

A question of an old person: Could loops in the aging sensory and memory system be analogous with (is it ‘to’ or ‘with’?) the proliferation of capillaries in the aging circulatory system? It’s a thought, but I recall I was only twenty-seven years old when I first realized I couldn’t recall such grammatical terms. That really surprised me for I had been out of undergraduate school only four years and worked among college educated middle and upper-middle class folk. In four years, I neither heard nor made in conversation even one reference to grammar! This phenomenon of forgetting terms reminds me of my current need to say the name of a muscle at least once a week or I’ll be unable to find the word when I am trying to explain something to a client. Now that list of terms I memorized in my fifties. Should I find that consoling? But lists of words I memorized in junior high or even earlier and have used for decades? Why should they disappear? Oh well, I’m just happy they are still available, even if my search for them takes me into memories and the like. Someday (soon?) I’ll start forgetting what I’m searching my mind for but hopefully will enjoy tours of my past as I follow loop after loop through my tiring brain. I hope I find my past as entertaining to me as I hope my novel will be to others.

Denver, 2012