English Lesson

It says somewhere that one of G-d’s greatest gifts to us is the ability to forget. That way, pain and suffering don’t stay with us forever. Memories of bad experiences fade with time. The cost of this all, as you well know, is that good memories also fade away. We forget details of places, people and events. Sometimes we even make up our own memories in place of the ones that we forgot. Have you ever had a conversation that went something like this:

“Yeah, I remember. It was a big blue boat with white writing on the side. How can I forget?”
“Actually, it was a small white boat with blue writing on the side. You were three at the time, how can you possibly remember?”
“No, I’m sure of it: big, blue with white writing!”

This is called misremembering. It’s not exactly forgetting, but it’s remembering incorrectly. We do this for all sorts of things, especially people:

“He was such a good guy.”
“Well, he evicted us from our house.”
“No, wasn’t that his brother?”
“I think you are misremembering.”

Misforgetting is another thing altogether. Misforgetting is when you forget something incorrectly. In other words, you thought you knew something and forgot it, but the reality is that you never knew it to begin with so you have misforgotten it.

“Um, I used to know how many liters of water evaporate from the Mediterranean Sea every year, but I forgot”.
“I think you mean the Black Sea. You never studied the Mediterranean region”
“Oh, yeah, I think you are right! I just misforgot”

Misforgetting can be useful. It can make you look wiser than you actually are. For example, you can be at a dinner party, blabbering on about stocks and shares and financial markets and then say something like, “Was it ACME Ltd that went up or was it Company X that did. It was so long ago, I don’t remember”. The fact that you never heard of either of these companies is irrelevant, you have simply planted the idea in your listeners’ minds that you, at one stage, knew all of the details but you just forgot. In other words, another definition of misforgetting is “lying”, but only if done on purpose.

Misforgetting is a great word. Not only because (to my knowledge) I just made it up, but because it will confound those who don’t know what it means:
“Hang on, didn’t you say that you used to know the code but you forgot it?”
“Oh, actually I don’t think I ever did. I must have been misforgetting at the time I said that”
“Um, well, that’s alright then, I guess…”

The word “misforget” is also a great word because it describes the combination of two mistakes into one. At first you forget, but then you realize that you forgot incorrectly. I don’t think there are too many words that can do that.

I suppose to “unmisforget” is to have once thought that you misforgot, but then you realize that you actually forgot correctly. Unmisforgetting can be a very satisfying experience. You can feel victorious that you unmisforgot something and set the record straight that you really did forget it correctly. This word trumps “misforget” because not only does it combine two mistakes into one word, but then, with the addition of only two letters, it corrects one of the mistakes.

Now you know why my wife doesn’t let me help my kids with their English homework.