Loose Leaf Notes

This is what cohorts do when one is having a birthday and she and her friends are celebrating at Floyd’s Oddfellas Cantina. One friend in the group introduced herself to another friend’s new boyfriend as “a cohort,” which then triggered the game we, women of a certain mature status, frequently find ourselves playing. It’s called “Let’s all try to think of the word that no one can remember.” It’s hard to think of anything else until one of us remembers the forgotten word. The game can go on for hours, and in this case it went on for days.
After hearing the word “cohort,” the birthday girl told us about another similar word that her college professor had called her and her friends, but she couldn’t remember it. “Companions?” someone guessed. No. “Comrades?” No. “Colleagues?”
She shook her head and said, “It’s a stranger word than those, one that I wasn’t familiar with.”
The next day, feeling sure I had it, I called and left a message on her answering machine, “It must be compadre,” I said into the phone.
But later in the day, while shopping at the Harvest Moon, where she works, she informed me that compadre was not the right word. We grabbed one of the owners walking by. “Tom’s Irish. He loves words. Maybe he’ll know it,” we both said.
“Communist?” he guessed. NO! “Constituent?” I countered. NO!
Later, in one last attempt and after a Thesaurus search, I typed and sent an email, “Could it be concomitants: existing or occurring together or in connection with another; accompaniment?”
“You know, concomitant may be very close or could be it. Would she have said concomitancy in reference to people, though?” she wondered.
I guess we’ll be calling ourselves cohorts, unless we hear otherwise. Maybe someone out has a good guess for the mystery word.