forgetty

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /fəˈɡɛti/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /fɚˈɡɛti/, [-ɾi]

From forget +‎ -y (“having the quality of; inclined to”).

forgetty (comparative more forgetty, superlative most forgetty)

1. Tending to forget things, forgetful.
   • 1896 January 30, “The Conversation Corner”, in The Congregationalist, page 179:

     Please tell me what is D. F.’s name? I ought to remember but am so “forgetty”!

2. In a state of forgetting, having forgotten.
   • 2012, Padgett Powell, You & Me, page 12:

     We are over here, I see that, and all that is over there, and this over hereness and that over thereness is a small part of infinite other relations of hereness and thereness, I see all this, but then I get a bit forgetty, and, just, don’t have this particular-in-aggregate setup in my head, and I say something like “I forget where we are.”

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:forgetty.

Coined or popularized by Cordwainer Smith (see quotations below). Seemingly from forget +‎ -y (suffix forming diminutive or familiar nouns).

forgetty (plural forgetties)

1. (science fiction) A person whose memory has been erased or damaged.
   • 1965, Cordwainer Smith, “On the storm planet”, in When the People Fell, published 2012, page 517:

     Forgetties were barely above underpeople in status. They were persons convicted of various major crimes, to whom the courts of the worlds, or the Instrumentality, had allowed total amnesia instead of death or some punishment worse than death

   • 1965, Cordwainer Smith, “Three to a Given Star”, in Galaxy, volume 24, page 127:

     Alma came out of the cube Finisternis as a forgetty, conditioned to remember nothing of her long sad psychotic life before the Instrumentality had sent her on a wild mission among the stars.

   • 1979, M.A. Foster, Gameplayers of Zan, page 27:

     She had thought in the past of autoforgetting with dread and fear, feeling something unclean and wretched about being a forgetty. But there was something worse, a whole universe of somethings-worse.

   • 1987, Rory Harper, “Snorkeling in the River Lethe”, in Amazing Stories, volume 61, page 120:

     “You ever been feverish before?”
     “Once. I only forgot about a year and a half.” […] “I’ll be a fresh forgetty in a day or two, and you don’t keep somebody in jail when they don’t even remember breaking the law.”