I know exactly what I mean. I just can’t think of the word for it

19 January 2008

Matthew Parris's missing words

Writing for the Times last week I found myself bogged down in a patch of linguistic mud. I had begun a sentence thus: ‘Discussing a mutual acquaintance who keeps breaking into foul-mouthed language at inappropriate moments’ ... — and then couldn’t quite lay my hands on the word I wanted next, though it seemed to be on the tip of my tongue. It meant (this word) ‘the person I was talking to’.

So I continued to write, inserting within square brackets ‘the person I was talking to’, and hoping the right word would come to me before I filed the column.

It didn’t. So I simply had to remove the square brackets. The piece as published continued ‘...the person I was talking to remarked...’ (etc), which was perfectly clear, but gratingly inelegant. The word never did come to me, and I have had to conclude that the English language has no single noun in vernacular use to describe what we might call a ‘co-conversationalist’: the person talking to, or discussing something with, someone else.

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