My husband picked me up from my new patient visit at Mountain Dental in Lake Placid.

“How was the hygienist shame game?”

“Nonexistent!” I said. “They were nice! First time ever I didn’t get a lecture about flossing. Which reminds me — we need some of that.” I paused in verbal quicksand. “You know, the floss stuff, tooth floss.”

“Tooth floss?” he said, frowning. “I am not sure that is right.”

“It’s not?” I asked, rolling the word in the air. “Is it teeth floss?”

“Umm,” he said, and we laughed. “Is it?”

This was my first foray into the vast galaxy of hidden words.

I don’t have the vocab chops of my fellow logophile Bob Seidenstein, famed writer of the “Inseide Dope” column. Bob knows words. Bob was also raised on the medieval altar of grammar — diagramming sentences, memorizing dangling modifiers and reciting prescriptive rules born before email existed. Bob helps me with words and grammar, and anything else he feels I need to know, from the naming of Genghis Khan’s children to why pugs snore. My first thought was: Call Bob. Bob would know this silly noun. But pride prevented the call.

I was in a state of profound sadness. How had my words failed me? I choose words like perusing a tasty 20-foot breakfast buffet, carefully. I love words in all languages, so long as they aren’t repetitive. Redundant phrases twist my gut like barbed hooks scraping inward. I hasten to highlight these dooddads because you will never unsee, or unhear them.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, tautology refers to “the repetition of the same idea using different words,” ditties like: “past history,” “end results” and “they arrived in succession one after another.” I know, makes you squirm, right?

Pleonasm is a lexical redundancy, using more words than necessary. My all time favorite is “tuna fish,” followed by “hot water heater,” “burning fire” and “true facts.” (However, with the current culture, true facts may be a necessary clarification.)

So there I was, a lover of words and critical of those chosen, driving to purchase that “stuff.” Suspended in a black hole, my brain floated. Each second struck the death knell of my frontal lobe as I tried combinations like “teeth thread” and “gum slide.” Then, like a bingo winner on a rainy Saturday night, Kris yelled “DENTAL FLOSS!” The relief! A wave of knowledge erased my grief. My former worries fled. Of course — dental floss. We repeated it and refiled dental floss under “D” for “duh” in our cortex card catalogue.

Realizing we were on the precipice of future tooth floss moments, we made a pact: No heckling each other during a brain-freeze moment. This was a serious vow for two products of the ’80s; but we survived neon tights and popped collars, so a few lost words should be a piece of pie.