When words lose meaning
- Semantic Satiation: When repeated words lose meaning
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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
- Nonsense Word: Meaningless words
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Sesquipedalian: Use of long confusing words (deliberately or not)
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Circumlocution: Use of too many words to convey an idea, often to evade the topic
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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"
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Barbarian: How Greeks perceived foreign languages ("baa" "baa")
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Semantic Anomaly: The square root of Milly's desk drinks humanity. (also Chomsky's example)
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Doublethink: Logically contradicting sentences
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Newspeak:
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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)
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Sesquipedalian: Using a lot of words that most people do not understand
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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
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Truth-Value Gap: "The king of France is bald", but there is no king of France.
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