I often have this problem but can perfectly remember a word in a different language that fits. Sometimes it sounds like I'm trying to be pretentious dropping foreign words while I'm just bad at brain.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Hey, sometimes other languages have a more exact word for the concept you're trying to convey. I completely get it.
That said, the precision is sometimes lost on the audience.
Came here to say. I can often remember the Spanish word when I forget the English word.
"It's not a stutter, I'm just buffering. Gimme a sec."
What is worse is when you do have a stutter and this causes your stutter to start
Ferreal. I know that point in the rabbit hole where I'm inhabiting the lore tunnel more than the conversation of the moment. Packet loss is crazy, but inflow is often a deluge and external comms can suffer from syntax overload. A stutter from another motherfucker of an ADHD ghost in the machine. 🤪
Just 10 minutes ago, I plopped an English word into a sentence in my native language because I couldn't think of a good word in Danish for it.
Tbf though, "sustainable" IS a much better word for what I was talking about than any Danish one 🤷
3 topics later:
“Schadenfreude! That’s the word I was thinking of. Sorry, continue with what you were saying.”
Haha brilliant 👏
And then the word you thought of is more complicated than the one you wanted and you have trouble pronouncing it correctly and no one understands it
My brain thinks of a word that sounds similar but I know is not the right one and it just refuses to let go of that word.
Mine picks the wrong word to say, then thinks of the correct word as I'm saying the incorrect word and then blends them together.
My power move is to just say the wrong word and make it stick. My group of friends have a lot of weird slang now.
Is that an ADHD thing?
It can be. Take internet diagnosticians with a huge grain of salt. Particularly during US hours when no one can actually afford a doctor.
As an American, this is how I get my medical advice
Even if you can afford a doctor, I'm not sure I'd risk a US diagnosis these days, what with all the talk of being sent off to a pleasant farm where nothing bad will happen to you.
I'm waiting for Ol' Pete to lay down a policy directive determining that those of us on stimulants, anxiety meds, antidepressants, etc. are unfit for military service. I'll gladly take medical retirement with full benefits for life because of some Adderall. Good luck manning Cyber and Intel.
To be fair, Internet grumblings on Reddit were actually a good starting point for me. The first, most important step, was learning that ADHD existed as something much more than just the wild child that's bouncing off the walls.
Then I started seeking out people with ADHD sharing their experiences (and, of course, memes), and I was shaken by how much some of them resonated with me. There were habits, fidgets, quirks I had that I had never seen or heard of anyone else doing that turned out to be common with ADHD.
To your point, yes, there were and still are plenty of people recklessly and inappropriately linking everything to ADHD or promoting harmful misinformation, which is why I purposely stuck with reading personal perspectives and not "authoritative" statements. Even so, I kept seeing more and more things that perfectly described me and I finally felt seen. Which led me to looking into professional research about ADHD that ended up explaining even more of my entire life, in turn pushing me to finally seek a diagnosis.
All that to say there are some good resources on the US side. You just have to be willing to dig through mountains of dog shit--and recognize that it's dog shit in the first place--to find the occasional nugget.
I’d say most ADHD issues are not explicit ADHD issues. The mass of the issues occurring is what makes ADHD.
People without ADHD can often relate, that’s why many say “that’s not ADHD, everybody has that.”
YES mf, but I have it More.
Nothing against you
I'm pretty sure it is.
It's a FAAAAAAA...
Is this a representation of self?
.... I mean, is this me?
I do this constantly. Forget names of things or words. I dont had ADHD tho, im just retarded
No, I don't have a huge vocabulary because I am some genius. I have it because I need to have lots of words for the same thing to make up for my memory recall fail rate.
And yet you remember a super unimportant detail you've heard once years ago. At least that's what it was like for me, before I was on medication.
Do meds help even out your memory?
Yes, although they (methylphenidate) seem to slowly become less and less effective, but maybe it is just me becoming used the medicated state. They are enabling me to "sort" important and "discard" unimportant memories much more effectively, as not to say at all, prior.
Edit: The grestest benefit of the medication was the ability to concentrate properly and me being able to do tasks that I had pushed away from me before. It essentially enabled me to get my shit together.
I buy myself time by saying "what's the word for..." and by the time I've said that, or perhaps because I primed my brain for it, I immediately remember, and finish by asking what the word for the word I'm thinking of is, which ends up confusing more people than if I hadn't tried to remember the word at all.
I have the opposite problem. All the adjectives/synonyms come to mind at once, stammering while I have to sift through all that noise in real-time. It makes me feel like my mother tongue is a foreign language sometimes.
Protip: if this is you, just pause mid-sentence and look thoughtful while you pull it together. It'll make you look even smarter.
Reminds me of when Obama was giving speeches, he had his signature start stop style. It was because he was thinking before he spoke. Conservatives at the time claimed he sounded stupid because he didn't just word vomit his thinking immediately.
Which is rich considering that a lot of southern conservative politicians model their speaking style on pastors and ministers, complete with reverb to sound like they're in the pulpit. It's a signature style. Where the speaker. Has a habit. Of talking. Slowly. And, deliberately. To sound like. They have. Moral authority.
It's always projection with these clowns.