There’s a word that Mike Leach is trying to conjure from somewhere deep within the bedraggled utility closet of his mind, and this word is escaping him, just as the context of this particular digression has escaped pretty much everyone else in the room. Somehow, Leach’s conversational roulette wheel has landed on the subject of Roman emperors, and how there was a guy called a something-or-other whose job it was to stand behind the emperor, reminding him — and here I shall quote Leach directly, for the sake of historical accuracy — “how dangerous it was to take your eye off the thing, or whatever.”

Thank you, Michael Weinreb. You just gave an example of a word finding problem!