Chances are, now that you've met the word, you're more likely to recall it than the actual people you meet, as you stand in the headlights, tongue-tied and tartling. The dread is palpable, your civic failing luminous. Either you take a plunge – Gus? Graeme? – or you fess up, and have your indecorum confirmed.

But relax. Please. Unless you struggle to name your beloved, your kids, your immediate circle, then quit the self-reproach. For all our pains, not every name will stick in the matrix. Our brains are lint traps for the daily onslaught of data, the fluff often stifling the handier details.

Play things forward, add a few more decades, and forgetting people's names can trigger existential alarm. Suddenly, just because that actor in that film, with that other actor, can't be recalled, you start surfing websites for convalescent care in your area. You Dymo-label the cat. Your sister. You agonise.

But you shouldn't. Joseph Jebelli, an English neuroscientist, and author of In Pursuit of Memory, puts it more plainly: ''Forgetting things in old age is not a sign of dementia. Your memory gets worse as it gets older, but that is fundamentally different from Alzheimer's.''

To forget is human, I think the saying goes. Misplacing peripheral names is equivalent to losing abstract nouns you seldom call on. Prosopagnosia, say, is the technical term for face-blindness, that inability to recognise a visage, let alone name it. But for some reason, I can't inscribe that word in the mental Rolodex. I can recall faces OK, but not the term for failing to know if you know one.

Fringing the limits of vocab and experience, names and words get slippery. Pareidolia is a second scourge: the brain's itch to imagine patterns in random objects, like seeing Jesus on your toast, or a sad koala in the clouds. I love that word too, yet never seem to grip it.

A third word relates to trees, specifically the way their roots bypass obstacles, or zigzag along pavement grooves. There's a term for that, a name I once knew, and one day it will worry its way back. Just like you'll remember the name of that guy who stood on the sidelines last winter. Wait. Guy. That was it. Guy. But the party's over. The Uber's left, the kitchen's swabbed, and you're left standing in the empty sunroom, tartling.

davidastle.com
Twitter @dontattempt