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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.
edit: fixed typo
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.