Back when I was smart...

In high school, had you asked me the definition of many a fifty-cent word, I could've given you a concise definition. These days, I can anagram it for you (or at least find a lot of words within it), and probably use it vaguely in a sentence, but there are no longer definitions in my head for much of anything, and it makes me feel kinda dumb. I have my Yahoo! page set to give me the Braingle module, which includes memory techniques, brain teasers, and other smart person stuff, and one of the categories is "Vocabulary Builder." Every day this week, it's given me a word that I look at and say "oh, I know that word," and yet all that comes into my head is a visual representation of something my brain vaguely associates with the word, often with the aid of an anthropomorphosized animal. For example, I see the word "mendacious" and my brain conjures up a picture of a duck talking under its breath. When I look it up on google, I find out that it means lying; given to lying; intentionally untrue, which, sure, vaguely relates to my random mental image, but why can't I come up with definitions anymore (that was a rhetorical question). Mendacious, by the way, contains at bunch of good seven-letter Scrabble words, including ANOMIES, DOMINES, and MUCOSAE.