It’s not unusual to have a “difficulty with names” as one gets older, but that difficulty typically worsens after the onset of a neurodegenerative disorder, such as dementia or stroke or MND. Of course the global impact of those diseases is to impair cognitive function generally. Even so, it seems to be true, as Carlo Semenza discusses in his paper “Retrieval Pathways for Common and Proper Names” (2005), that proper names and proper nouns (Sophie Scott, Eric Morecambe, the Eiffel Tower, Microsoft) are more difficult to retrieve than common nouns, and the current view is that this may be because they are part of a distinct mechanism in the brain that is more resource-consuming.
The damaged brain struggles to find context for a personal name or the title of a film, because those attributions are specific and arbitrary at the same time: they do not refer very far beyond themselves. Whereas a common noun sits within a complex network of semantic associations and contexts (garden, soil, home, territory, belonging, safety), some of which are formed very early on in our lives. This is where it gets tricky, because these common nouns can also have very personal, specific associations (mum, dad), somewhat like proper names, and indeed the whole point of “naming” – a person or a thing or a concept – is that of producing a kind of rightness, something the meaning of which is agreed upon, and apt.
It is this social aspect of naming – embracing the arbitrary and the apt – that Mark Twain examines so tenderly in his Diaries of Adam and Eve (1893, 1905). The two stories are affectionate reworkings of the Genesis myth from the point of view of our supposed forebears, both of whom are unique (the first man and woman) and typical. What Eve, the cleverer of the two, discovers is that she is a kind of poet. To her is given the gift of finding “the best words in the best order” (Coleridge). She looks at animals or places and gives them the right name straight away, because somehow the knowledge is already “common” within her. Alas, it’s all a mystery to poor, illiterate Adam, who thinks Cain and Abel are kangaroos.