"If I don't say it now I'll lose it"

Now the held thought, because it's the thing that actually pushes the jump out of your mouth.

Someone is talking and something occurs to you. A connection, a correction, the answer. It's a good thought and it's sitting in your mouth, and you know from experience that if you wait it'll be gone, or the conversation will have moved and there'll be no place for it. The pressure of a held thought is real. I'm not going to tell you it isn't. Anyone who's had a name on the tip of their tongue knows that holding a thing in mind while attending to something else is work.

Two observations, though. The first is that a thought which can't survive twenty seconds wasn't much of a thought. If it's a real point, it'll still be a point at the finish. If it's gone by then, it was a reflex, and the conversation has lost nothing. Most held thoughts, if you watch them, are one of the two. Either they're still there after the finish and you say them, a little later than you'd have liked and to a person who can now hear them. Or they've dissolved, and you find you've nothing to add, and that's worth knowing.

The second is that holding the thought is what makes you deaf to the tail. You can't attend fully to the end of their sentence while guarding a sentence of your own. So the jump isn't just early. It's coming from a person who's stopped listening a few seconds before, in order to hold the thing they're about to say. The tail was lost before you spoke.

A practical answer, which I'll come back to in chapter 19. One word on a pad. Not the sentence, the word. "Twelve", for the woman at number twelve. "Dip", for the north region. The word holds the thought so your attention doesn't have to, and the thought is there at the finish if it's still wanted.

There's a version of the held thought that's a correction. They've got a fact wrong and you know it. I'd only say that a correction delivered at the finish is a correction, and one delivered in overlap is a fight. The fact is the same. Where you put it decides which one it is.