Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Day 11: Word-finding

One of the odder side effects of Lamictal is difficulty with "word-finding".  It's kind of like it sounds -- you're looking for a common, everyday word, and you just can't think of what it is.

I experienced a little bit of that this morning.  My art student broke a palette knife, and remarked that it was a good thing they were the cheap plastic ones.  I mentioned that I've never broken a palette knife, but I suspected that it was partly due to the fact that I don't use ... don't use ... that type of paint ... whatever this type of paint is called, that comes out of the tube ... .  Argh.  What I'm trying to say is, I use liquid acrylics, and it takes less work to mix them.

The phrase I was looking for was "heavy body acrylics".  It's the acrylic paint that comes in tubes.  As a painter and art teacher, I know the phrase, and I've known it for years.  It does not represent some new and complex vocabulary.

It happened a few times this morning (ironically enough, once when the word I was looking for was "coherence"), but the "heavy body acrylics" incident stands out.  It wasn't like I was trying to find the "right" word, and it wasn't like the word was "on the tip of my tongue".  The words simply were not there.  I stared at the paint tube, trying to remember what that type of paint was called, and just couldn't.  "Heavy body acrylics" finally came to me as I was driving home.

It will be interesting to see if this is just a verbal phenomenon, or if it happens with writing too.

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