I’ve never been very good with nouns when speaking out loud. The names of objects, in particular, often escape me – as do the names of people I know.
I click my fingers and substitute whatsit for cup and it for the name of a friend’s beloved child.
Living in another country exacerbates this problem, even though the language here is the same one I ostensibly grew up speaking.
Some of the differences are easy to remember: pants are not trousers, for instance.
But unfortunately the multitudes of other differences are more difficult to track. The fact that a number of my friends grew up speaking various other languages, or different dialects of English, adds to the confusion as we sit over a late dinner lavishly describing something that could be covered with one precise word, if only we knew what it was.