I also got it back in early 2020 when doctors still said, “it can’t be covid, you haven’t been to china”. Now I have the same thing happen as you describe, but I legit don’t know if it’s covid or just getting older. I remember my dad always used to do the same thing when I was a kid, calling things by approximately, but not quite exactly the right term. We always thought it was funny, how his memory could be so close yet so far like that. Now it happens to me all the time. Names of restaurants, actors, random words.

One up side of LLMs is they’re actually pretty decent at figuring out the word I’m thinking of from the description I can manage. The other day I was trying to remember the word “ambitious”, and searched Google for “word that starts with A that means biting off more than you can chew”. The normal results didn’t have it, so I tried AI assist and it got it immediately. Also, in trying to recall this story, I forgot the word again and had to do the exact same exercise :/

I kinda hope it’s not long term covid and just normal getting older shit…