My trigger word for semantic satiation is "what" for some reason.
Reminds me what what what scene from The Lighthouse.
The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
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Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#42We 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
"State of the art"
Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#43https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
Hmm. It would make a lot more sense to me if it were called semantic saturation, not satiation.
Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#44There’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.
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
Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#45It 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.
Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#46We 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 not what semantic satiation is about
Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#47Is 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.
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 so…
> 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".
Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :)
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
Re: The the the the induction of jamais vu: word alienation and semantic satiation
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 -