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When words lose meaning

  • Semantic Satiation: When repeated words lose meaning
  • Nonce Words: Temporarily used non-meaningful words

    • Nonsense Word: Meaningless words
      • Non-Word: Not pronounceable. e.g. blsdh
      • Pseudo-Word: Pronounceable. e.g. blicket, wug
    • Ghost Word: A typo from a reference work.
    • Protologism: A nonce word that's been used by a small group
    • Stunt Word: A word that's used just for a reaction. e.g. "jertain" in the curtain
  • Sesquipedalian: Use of long confusing words (deliberately or not)

  • Circumlocution: Use of too many words to convey an idea, often to evade the topic

  • Syntactically Correct Nonsense: e.g. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously (by Chomsky)

  • Syntactically Incorrect Nonsense: e.g. Furiously sleep ideas green colorless (by Chomsky)
  • Gibberish: Same as "word salad" or "gobbledygook"
  • Barbarian: How Greeks perceived foreign languages ("baa" "baa")

  • Semantic Anomaly: The square root of Milly's desk drinks humanity. (also Chomsky's example)

  • Doublethink: Logically contradicting sentences

  • Newspeak:

  • Bloviating: Speaking without conveying anything

  • Dissembling: Obfuscation for the purpose of misdirection, usually using everyday speech (beating about the bush to eventually escape)
  • Sophistry: Illogical sentences wrapped in rhetoric (like in some disingenious advertisements)
  • Sesquipedalian: Using a lot of words that most people do not understand

  • Ice Cream Koan: Looks like a Koan, but is meaningless (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IceCreamKoan)

  • Vacuous Truths: Statements of the form "if a, then b", but both a and b are false
  • Truth-Value Gap: "The king of France is bald", but there is no king of France.

  • https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/204362/what-do-you-call-the-rhetoric-strategy-of-purposely-writing-a-paragraph-that-no

Notes

  • We can perceive syntactically incorrect statements to an extent
  • We can perceive semantically incorrect statements to an extent
  • We can perceive syntactically and semantically incorrect statements to an extent
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