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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
48 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadJamais 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.
edit: fixed typo
Off the top of my head:
iconic
epic
brilliant
"blazingly fast"
literally
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339500
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666558
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436430
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
Are these the same thing?
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.
Knee
Gnu!
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.
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.
Like how (hard) Linguistic Relativity "is" "false".
That totally sucks.
Or maybe it blows.
Hard to know for sure.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
Though is it satiation if the meaning is different for different instances?
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.
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)
Suddenly I locked up and was like "WTF is a total?" The word still sounds strange to me sometimes.
Can’t say it rings a bell.
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.