The purpose of being unable to remember what’s on the tip of your tongue

The phenomenon I’m about to describe will be infuriatingly familiar to older readers, but will have been encountered by people of any age. Even in childhood we meet it, and as we grow old it happens more and more often. So common is the experience that it would surprise me if there was any language and culture that lacked an idiomatic expression to describe it. Spanish certainly has one: ‘En la punta de la lengua.’ So does French: ‘Sur le bout de la langue.’

The Poles, I’m told, say ‘Na koncu jezyka.’ In Wales they say ‘Blewyn tasod.’ All these idioms refer to the same thing. In English the curious phrase finds more than a million references in Google. The phrase is: ‘On the tip of my tongue.’

The Welsh say it’s a hair on their tongue; the Germans say it lies on their tongue; the Russians say it’s spinning on their tongue. The French and Spanish idioms are an almost literal translations of ours. And we all mean the same thing: a name, a word, a melody… something in the memory that we know is there, which we feel is there, but which we cannot for the moment retrieve.

I’m using the idiom in this precise and very sharply focused sense: not to describe something we ought to know but seem to have forgotten (my engagements for next Tuesday evening, for instance); nor to describe something we can be sure is buried somewhere in memory because we did once know it, but which we cannot seem to locate (the date of the accession of Henry IV of France, perhaps). Tuesday’s engagements, and Henry’s accession, certainly do lie somewhere in my brain, but I know this only because I know they were once placed there: the evidence of their existence is to be found by reference to another, verifiable, event.