words as people

I noticed some time ago that we never really forget people. Maybe temporarily a name, or even a face (especially if it's changed from our expectation), but in general: we forget anything else, but other humans---their identities, their basic relationships and features---we just seem to be very good at remembering.

This stands to reason. As deeply social primates for whom other members of the species are perhaps the most important entities out there in the world, having a memory that reliably and robustly remembers other humans is more than just a good idea; it's pretty much crucial to survival.

So what if we tried to bring this great capacity to bear on that most notorious of language-learning memory problems: recalling vocabulary?

What if you started to think of every word you learned as a person? What if you developed a human-like emotional relationship to it? And just generally cultivated a very social-relational sense of it, as we have for humans? Remembering how, when, and where we first met it, who (i.e. other words) it is related to and how?

This makes sense to me in large part because even before this explicit idea, I think I was already doing this to a fair degree. As a lover of words, I often do tend to remember exactly the situation where I first learned a word: who, what, when, where, how, and why. I've no doubt at all that personal relational detail (not to mention the obvious grounding in real-life experience rather than book-learning) greatly helps me recall the word word when needed, and also to FEEL the full of its use and sense (to have the necessary relevant "language-feeling" for it, as they say in Chinese with the term 語感 yǔgǎn). And on top of that, I have always always constantly taken any new word and looked for how it relates to others: by derivation, by shared semantics/semantic domain, by collocation, by humorous phonological similarity (both within the same language and without)...all of these have just been what makes sense to do to meet the word and know it well. As one would with a person. And I would guess that placing that word in this dynamic web of multiple relationships helps fix the form in my memory (with lots of redundancy and reinforcement), and offer many robust roads to its retrieval from memory.

So there you go. Conceptualizing words (and other lexemes, up to phrasal idioms and beyond) as people might be a helpful mnemonic approach, piggybacking off of our handy primate memory for our own kind.