Related:

Why repeating a word makes it go weird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865690 - March 2024 (1 comment)

Is linguistic inflation insanely awesome? (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31726534, https://web.archive.org/web/20230324130314/http://www.macmil... - June 2022 (3 comments)

Semantic Satiation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26915742 - April 2021 (53 comments)

Is this what happens with words losing their entire meaning with propaganda?

Not going to quote a specific word, but I live in a country that has gone into propaganda overdrive during the last few weeks and people who should know better (quite possibly including myself) are starting to use words to mean anything and their opposite.

No, this is about how a repeated word can lose familiarity and meaning entirely. In particular, the audible and visible forms become unfamiliar, as though it is no longer a legitimate word at all and instead sounds and appears like pure nonsense or of another unknown language.

No, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu... is a good essay on the use of propaganda to destroy language, and the natural process with which it's bought into.

how woke of you /s

The closer one would be semantic drift, But a very specific kind of drift. Semantic dilution / diffusion ?

It's the reason expertise fields end up creating new terms with time. The old terms discriminatory sharpness decrease with time as they get more popular and used in more and more places.

I guess the end game for a language would be when you can no longer tell apart yes and no even when taking into account the sourounding context.

I wonder it there are people who do this kind of linguistic research using information theory, doing a quantified tracking of the collapse of expressivity of terms and more generally languages.

> I guess the end game for a language would be when you can no longer tell apart yes and no even when taking into account the sourounding context.

Like how (hard) Linguistic Relativity "is" "false".

> to mean anything and their opposite.

That totally sucks.

Or maybe it blows.

Hard to know for sure.

Very interesting to know this is a real phenomenon.

On some occasions, a word someone said sticks, and when I keep thinking about that word, it starts to sound strange, weird and a silly made up stupid sounding word. I noticed that it happens with any word that I pick, not just the words that get stuck.

I use to think to myself that it's interesting that a word becomes stupid the more you think about it. Now I know this situation has a name. Thanks.

Hmm. It would make a lot more sense to me if it were called semantic saturation, not satiation.

My trigger word for semantic satiation is "what" for some reason.

Reminded me of the “say what” scene from Pulp Fiction ;-)

Yeah! What? OK!

Reminds me what what what scene from The Lighthouse.

> Jamais vu

Can’t say it rings a bell.

An easy way to do this is to remember this oddly grammatically correct sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Though is it satiation if the meaning is different for different instances?

I don’t think that’s the same at all. Nobody could ever actually understand that sentence without breaking it down.

Semantic satiation can come up when you’re having a conversation and use the same word often enough (not necessarily back to back) that it feels like that word is wrong, or doesn’t mean anything. You start to pay attention to the sound of the word instead of the meaning.

I think in language learning it’s important not to over-review content for this very reason.

When I worked in marketing software I experienced this often with the term "referral". To this day I still feel kindof weird when I see the term.

When I did a lot of web development I experienced something similar with the word "referer".

edit: fixed typo

Are you thinking of referer? (A misspelling of referrer, present in HTTP headers.)

Yes, referer, not referal, obviously, thanks!

There’s two phenomena that come to mind: 1) when I say the same word over and over and within a minute the word sounds and feels weird and wrong. 2) everyone overuses and exaggerates a word so much that it loses its power and meaning.

Are these the same thing?

I don't think so.

I've had number 1 occur to me just a few times in life. One where I was waiting for our printing class to be unlocked in school and when looking at PRINT SHOP on the door, suddenly PRINT became unreal to me. Like "what the fuck is this word". It is an odd and very jarring experience.

2 is more like saying "You're a nazi" when someone doesn't clean up spilled milk devaluing the impact of the term.

There's another case between these two. I once worked at a place where everybody used the word "leverage" in an infuriating way. Any time the word "use" was appropriate, they would instead say "leverage". I'm sure they'd "leverage" a piece of toilet paper to wipe their ass with. I felt like I was on The Kids in the Hall's "ascertain guy" skit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStcwT_RGrQ) except in reverse: everyone was saying "leverage" and I was the only one getting fed up with it. It almost seemed like it was coded talk, a shibboleth, a way of speaking that was an indicator you were "one of the team". At some point I thought to myself "seriously, what does leverage even mean?"

on occasion the distinct shape of a rare uppercase word like SANCTIMONIOUSNESS is just alien enough to trigger the first effect, though you might not realize why

Malkovich malkovich malkovich, literally.

Happened with me a few times with the word “knee”

Any relation to Monty Python?

Not Ni,

Knee

Gnu!

Genuinely interesting, thank you poster. I’ve encountered the sensation periodically since childhood and never had a word for it.

Jamais vu is a phenomenon operationalised as the opposite of déjà vu, i.e. finding subjectively unfamiliar something that we know to be familiar. We sought to document that the subjective experience of jamais vu can be produced in word alienation tasks, hypothesising that déjà vu and jamais vu are similar experiential memory phenomena.

We need the Oscars "In Memoriam" every year, but it's for words we lost to semantic satiation.

Off the top of my head:

iconic

epic

brilliant

"blazingly fast"

literally

This is about repeating the word many times in isolation of other words, not using an exaggeration for lesser things so the meaning drifts. I think everyone's familiar with it by trying to say the same word over and over again, it quickly becomes weird and seems to lose its meaning or even become hard to say.

GP is engaging in the iconic HN tradition of commenting something brilliant that has nothing to do with TFA. Literally seconds later, someone has to point out the epic failure. I've been reading HN for 17 years, and I must lament that it is turning "blazingly fast" into reddit. Because of people like me, I guess :)

Is that more or less frequent than the HN anti-pattern: "I thought this was about..." as if that being wrong about what article was about was in any way interesting?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666558

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436430

Ouch. I've been reading and commenting for years here, but I don't presume to gatekeep, or indeed lament that it's turning into reddit(?), the latter being distinctly against the HN commenting guidelines. Just downvote me and move on, you've got the karma for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I upvoted you, and definitely didn't mean any offence

My bad, I misread both your tone and your meaning, an impressive combo. Cheers -

At this point "blazingly fast" is just marketing noise. Any product whose page does not use the phrase must be abominably slow.

"State of the art"

This is not what semantic satiation is about

I remember working on a Jasper report once where I had a bunch of column subtotals and a total of all of them. Total, total, total total...

Suddenly I locked up and was like "WTF is a total?" The word still sounds strange to me sometimes.

I seem to recall getting that feeling looking at a box of the cereal called Total.

It even works on LLM. If you ask an LLM to continually repeat a word, it can break its training and start to regurgitate training data.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/this-silly-attack-reveals-snippet...

The only solution at the moment appears to detect the behavior and to stop the LLM from doing it.