Why this word is great
SCOTOMIZE — [Verb] To psychologically obscure an undesirable memory or traumatic experience by unconsciously creating a selective mental blind spot. From French scotomiser, from Late Latin scotoma ("dizziness, dimness of vision"), from Ancient Greek σκότωμα (skótōma, "dizziness"), from σκοτόω (skotóō, "to darken, to make blind") + the English verbal suffix -ize. Unlike "repress," which generalizes the unconscious burial of distress, or "suppress," which implies a conscious, effortful restraint, to scotomize is to enact a defensive vanishing, a deliberate dimming of the mind's inner sight. It is the eye that skips over a single line in a familiar text, the family portrait where one figure seems never to have been photographed, the unmarked calendar date that passes with a vague, somatic unease. The psyche thus protects itself by carving hollows in its own history, where the shape of the void is the only evidence of what is gone.