Betty in Idlewild, California, notices that when she repeats a word while writing, even an ordinary one like among, it can start to look misspelled or meaningless. That temporary blanking-out is called semantic satiation, the mind’s sense that a repeated form has been drained of its usual associations. An informal analogy is the gnarly foot effect: stare at your foot long enough, and it starts to look oddly alien. When repetition in a draft starts to blur meaning, taking a break or working on another passage may help more than grabbing a not-quite-right thesaurus substitute. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Semantic Satiation” Is When Repeating Words Makes Them Start to Sound Like Nonsense”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, y’all. It’s Betty Anderson calling from Idlewild, California.
Hey, Betty.
Well, hi there. I didn’t know they said y’all in Idlewild.
Well, they don’t, but I was raised in Nashville, so it comes out sometimes.
Oh, great.
Oh, it’s natural. Good, good. Well, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here with you rock stars.
How about my guitar? You want to hear something?
Rock stars for nerds. That’s us.
Exactly.
Besides the song, what else can we do for you?
Well, I have a question that to me sounds kind of strange, but I thought if anybody would be interested in this, it would be you guys.
We appreciate strange.
Yeah.
So there’s this phenomenon that I experience when I’m writing a long document or something and I’m using the same word a lot.
And the word starts to look like it’s not a word.
Like, is that a real word?
Is that the right spelling?
Like something like the word among.
And so I’ll write a few times, and then I start looking at it like among.
Is it M-O-N-G-O?
This doesn’t look like a word to me.
And I don’t know what you would call it, if you’ve ever experienced that, but it’s just this kind of strange thing, and I thought you guys might have some input on that.
Oh, yeah, do we?
Oh, yeah.
There’s a term for that.
I believe this applies.
It’s called semantic satiation.
You are satiated.
Yeah, but if you say this term way too long, then it starts to look really weird.
Yeah, it becomes depleted of its reservoirs of subtlety.
Words are, when we talk about words mean, there are all these connotations and denotations.
And sometimes they’re hard to articulate, but we understand them in our heads.
And when you use them in multiple places, in a paper, for example, they have a slightly different subtlety and connotation, each paragraph and each sentence that you use them in.
And so in the intersection of these, you started, well, over here I met among to mean among three.
Over here it means among five.
Oh, interesting.
Over here I don’t even know how many people it’s among.
You’ll lose the meaning.
But I have my own term for it, which we haven’t talked about in the show for a long time.
I call it the gnarly foot.
The gnarly foot?
G-N-A-R-L-Y.
Now, everybody, while you’re listening, take off your shoe.
Take off your sock or your hose.
Okay, taking it off.
And look at your foot for a really long time.
And in a minute, you’re going to go, why is this ugly thing connected to my body?
This is an alien.
Oh, aliens have taken me over and they’re in the end of my leg.
I didn’t notice that that nail needed a trim.
Yeah, it’s the same feeling because you’re like, this is an absurd thing to be a part of my body.
How is this part of the human body?
This ugly knobby thing with calluses and bit nails and crooked toes.
Well, that might be your foot.
That is not my foot, you know.
Well, I’m not going to say very much about my feet.
They’re fine.
Keep looking.
Keep looking at that foot.
Keep them in shoes for a reason.
That is wild.
Okay.
So if you’re writing a document and let’s say you’re using, for example, the word among, would you suggest using a different word if it starts to get that blurry kind of feeling, or do you just trust and keep going with it?
It’s the writer’s choice.
Some writers, they won’t use the same word.
And then they struggle to find a better word.
And that leads them to making mistakes with the thesaurus.
They choose a word that’s not exactly right.
Other writers have no sensitivity at all to repetition and will overuse a word to such a point where you’re like, did you not have an editor?
Did you not have a dictionary?
Yeah, I think it’s a pretty transient feeling.
I would just lie down until it passes.
Yeah, exactly.
Or go work on a completely different document or a different part of it.
That’s true.
Yeah, that’s a good rule for writing anyway.
Well, I used to get this when I used to help my mother grade her papers, you know, when I was in high school and I was grading her kids junior high papers.
I mean, you would just start looking at the words and they would be spelled wrong and you’d be going, wait, oh, maybe that is right.
Right, because when you read enough bad writing, then you start to forget what good writing is.
You have to go back and read some more Edith Wharton or something like that just to catch up, just to fix it in your head.
So I think the conclusion we’re coming to is take a break and come back to it and have another look at it.
And the term that you want, the official term is semantic satiation.
And my term for it is gnarly foot.
I like gnarly foot.
It’s easier to say 10 times fast.
Yeah, it could be all one word, gnarly foot.
Gnarly foot.
Gnarly foot.
Thanks for calling, Betty.
Thanks, you guys, so much.
Have a great day.
Yeah, our pleasure.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
But really, that’s kind of a first world problem, right?
Definitely.
To be literate to start work and to be employed to write things where you get tired of the words.
That is a total FWP.
But it’s fixable.
It’s fixable.
All right. Have a lie down.
That’s my solution to everything.
Every good writer has a hammock.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
And we are all over social media.
Look for us there.
