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The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
- adolph 2y agoGenuinely 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.
- web3-is-a-scam 2y agoWhen 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.
- SonOfLilit 2y agoWhen I did a lot of web development I experienced something similar with the word "referer". edit: fixed typo
- wizzwizz4 2y agoAre you thinking of referer? (A misspelling of referrer, present in HTTP headers.)
- SonOfLilit 2y agoYes, referer, not referal, obviously, thanks!
- mpalmer 2y agoWe 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
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoThis 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.
- SonOfLilit 2y agoGP 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 :)
- khazhoux 2y agoIs 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=40339500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436430
- mpalmer 2y agoOuch. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- SonOfLilit 2y agoI upvoted you, and definitely didn't mean any offence
- clbrmbr 2y agoI think in language learning it’s important not to over-review content for this very reason.
- alexey-salmin 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/1046/ https://xkcd.com/1046/
- r721 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
- smusamashah 2y agoVery 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.
- montag 2y agoHmm. It would make a lot more sense to me if it were called semantic saturation, not satiation.
- Waterluvian 2y agoThere’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?
- pixl97 2y agoI 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.
- bitwize 2y agoThere'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 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?"
- __del__ 2y agoon 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
- usefulcat 2y agoMalkovich malkovich malkovich, literally.
- dwighttk 2y agoHappened with me a few times with the word “knee”
- LordGrey 2y agoMy trigger word for semantic satiation is "what" for some reason.
- NKosmatos 2y agoReminded me of the “say what” scene from Pulp Fiction ;-)
- 0xDEADFED5 2y agoYeah! What? OK!
- overengineer 2y agoReminds me what what what scene from The Lighthouse.
- Yoric 2y agoIs 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.
- JohnMakin 2y agohow woke of you /s
- chimpanzee 2y agoNo, 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.
- cynicalkane 2y agoNo, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language 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.
- gryn 2y agoThe 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.
- mistermann 2y ago> 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".
- otras 2y agoAn 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?
- comradesmith 2y agoI 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.
- yamrzou 2y agoRelated: Why repeating a word makes it go weird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865690 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31726534, https://web.archive.org/web/20230324130314/http://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/is-linguistic-inflation-insanely-awesome https://web.archive.org/web/20230324130314/http://www.macmil... - June 2022 (3 comments) Semantic Satiation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26915742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26915742 - April 2021 (53 comments)
- Tao3300 2y agoI 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.
- bitwize 2y agoI seem to recall getting that feeling looking at a box of the cereal called Total.
- schneems 2y ago> Jamais vu Can’t say it rings a bell.
- isaacfrond 2y agoIt 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-snippets-of-chatgpts-secretive-source-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.