LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  LANGUAGE AND SENILITY     Past fifty, a forgotten word feels like Alzheimer's knocking at the door. Names slip, words hide, and we panic: is senility beginning?     Alzheimer's frightens many more than cancer. Every day we hear of someone—friend, acquaintance, relative—slowly erased before our eyes. So when a word refuses to come, our hands grow clammy and dread takes over.     The other day I tried to recall a word from the opening of Kafka’s The Trial . I remembered a translation that used a sharper verb than “telling lies.” For twenty minutes on the bus, I tortured my brain. At home I checked: the word was traduce . Anxiety flooded in. Was this decline?     As if to mock me, I was then asked for the English of salpicadero . Nothing. Minutes later dashboard popped up, thumbing its nose.     We all fear forgetting. Tombstones promise remembrance because memory defines us—we are memory. In Homer’s Odyssey...

Do you forget words sometimes? Do you often hesitate and falter when speaking because a word, on the tip of your tongue, escapes you? Read my article in VivaFifty: " Forgetting a Word does not Make you Senile ."