Word usage…

I’m frustrated when I know there’s the perfect word in a given situation and can’t quite remember it. That’s when I remember that my verbal memory has a lot of junk in it: sports terms, even for sports I never played; trivia facts, ones I could easily look up now with Google; technical terms I once used a lot but don’t use at all in my writing; random words from French, German, Russian, and Spanish—a lot from the latter—that often fight with English; and so forth. The hard disk in my head probab...