933. Have you ever looked at a word, and it didn't seem like a real word anymore? It's a specific thing that happens in your brain called semantic satiation, and we have the fascinating ins and outs. Plus, we extol the merits of the full stop.
933. Have you ever looked at a word and it didn't seem like a real word anymore? It's a specific thing that happens in your brain called semantic satiation, and we have the fascinating ins and outs. Plus, we extol the merits of the full stop.
The full stop segment was by Joe Moran, a professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/semantic-satiation/transcript
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Hill. Hill. Hill?
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, we look at weird ways your brain can process words, and why you should learn to love the full stop.
by Mignon Fogarty
A few weeks ago, when I was editing Samantha Enslen’s segment about “it’s all uphill from here” versus “it’s all downhill from here,” the word “hill” started to look really weird to me. It didn’t even look like a word anymore — it was just like a strange collection of symbols — and I knew it was time to take a break. (laughs) And as anyone who works with words will tell you, that’s normal. I didn’t have a stroke or anything like that; it just happens sometimes. And it happens with other words too, as this clip from “Ted Lasso” demonstrates (one of my favorite shows). Ted is talking with his boss, Rebecca, and suddenly he gets confused about the word “plan”:
Ted: Hmm. I said “plan” too many times. Word’s lost all its meaning now. Plan, plan, plan. Hey, you tell Man City that this man has a plan. Plan, plan, plan.
Rebecca: Plan.
Ted: No. Plan, plan, plan.
Rebecca: Like “flan”: plan.
Ted: Flan that dessert?
Rebecca: Yes. Like flan.
Ted: Yeah. No, I don't dig on flan. Plan. Plan.
It probably didn’t help poor Ted that he and Rebecca pronounce the word differently to start with. But Coach Beard, the font of all knowledge, knew the deal:
Ted: Plan?
Coach Beard: Word become a sound?
Ted: What’s that called again?
Coach Beard: Semantic satiation.
Ted: Yeah, OK.
Semantic. Satiation. The word “semantic” is about “the meaning of language.” You may remember it from our shows about semantic bleaching, which is when a strong word loses its oomph. Its meaning changes; it’s bleached — like how “awesome” used to mean something that inspired true awe, and now it’s also a way to say you’re excited it’s Tuesday and there’s a new “Ted Lasso” episode. Awesome!
And “satiation” means “full” or even “too much.” You may have heard that word with respect to food. You are satiated when you’ve had enough food and you don’t want any more. Semantic satiation is like when your brain gets too full with a word and has had enough!
But biologically, it’s actually your brain being efficient. It’s like your neurons realize they don’t need to waste energy answering the door the third, fourth, and fifth time the neighbor kid rings the doorbell and runs. And it’s a good thing because if we paid attention to every single sound we heard, we’d quickly get overwhelmed.
In semantic satiation, your brain is doing something kind of like what it does with smells, in the way you stop smelling something if it’s been around for a while. If you cook fish, after a while the house doesn’t smell fishy to you, but then if you go for a walk around the block and come back, suddenly you’re like, “Wow. Ugh. Fish!” Well, when your nose took a break from that fish smell, you could smell it again. And the same thing happens with words: after a little break, I could recognize the word “hill” again.
The first research writings about semantic satiation
Psychologists have been aware of this weird thing with words for more than a hundred years. Elizabeth Severance and Margaret Floy Washburn described it in “The American Journal of Psychology” in 1907. And it wasn’t going unnoticed among regular people either. I love this bit from a 1910 novel by G.K. Chesterton that Richard Nordquist dug up for a Thought Co article:
Later researchers gave it names like “lapse of meaning,” “critical inhibition,” “reactive inhibition,” “verbal satiation,” “word blindness,” and more. But for whatever reason, it got the name that stuck when psychologists Leon James and Wallace Lambert called it semantic satiation in a 1961 journal article about how the phenomenon differs between people who became bilingual in different ways.
Bilingual people can experience semantic satiation in their own way
When people learn two languages at the same time, we call that being compound bilingual, and researchers think the languages in such people are stored together, in an intermingled way, in the brain. When James and Lambert exposed these people to a word until it lost its meaning in one language (like the word “house”), the word in the second language (like “maison” in French) also briefly lost its meaning.
But when people become fluent in a second language after they have mastered their first language, they are called coordinate bilinguals, and for those people, researchers think the two languages are stored more separately in the brain. When James and Wallace exposed coordinate bilinguals to the word “house” until it lost its meaning, the people didn’t have any problem with the French word “maison.” Lending support to the idea that languages can be stored in different ways in different people.
Some words are more likely to cause semantic satiation
It also turns out that some kinds of words are more likely to cause semantic satiation than others. For example, going back to my experience and the “Ted Lasso” bit, “hill” and “plan” are just the kinds of words that easily trigger semantic satiation because it’s more likely to happen with short, somewhat boring words.
On the other hand, words like “explosion” or “celebration” trigger emotions and are associated with things like danger and fun, so our brain says, “Yes! I need to pay close attention to this!” And these kinds of words also resist satiation because your brain starts accessing related things you associate with these words, like parties, family, friends, dancing, and so on for “celebration.”
In fact, it turns out that “hill” and “plan” aren’t even as bad as it gets. They are what we call content words; they carry a lot of meaning. But we have another category of words called function words, and semantic satiation is more likely to happen with them too. Function words don’t carry as much direct meaning as content words; they’re words like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions — “the,” “of,” “and.” Your brain quickly gets tired of seeing the word “of” over and over again. So boring! So meaningless! Absolutely no reason to pay attention to that.
Further, researchers have speculated that viewing a word in isolation or when it’s being used in a way that isn’t tied to its meaning — just like the way I was interacting with the word “hill” when I was writing about the word instead of writing about actual hills — that type of exposure can also increase the chance of semantic satiation.
So the next time you read or hear a word that suddenly doesn’t feel like a word to you anymore, notice what kind of word it is. Is it short? Is it boring? Is it already weak on concrete meaning like prepositions and articles? Then, don’t worry. Just give your brain a little break and the problem should go away.
And semantic satiation is just one more reason to remember to mix up your word choices so you don’t trigger semantic satiation in your readers.
And I want to take a quick detour to mention a few interesting things that initially seemed related but are actually slightly different, but still really interesting:
First is jamais vu: This is when something you know really well seems foreign — like when you walk into your childhood bedroom, and it seems completely unfamiliar. That initially sounds like semantic satiation, but it doesn’t happen after repeated exposure to your childhood bedroom. It just happens.
And second is Gestaltzerfall, which means “shape decomposition” in German. It was first used to describe a phenomenon that happened after a brain injury. The article is in German but a translation available through Wikipedia says, “when the subject stared at a truck for a while, the truck seemed to decompose into its motor, chassis, driver cab and the person could only focus on one of these parts until he briefly closed his eyes or looked away which reset the shape to the complete truck again.”
Gestaltzerfall doesn’t seem to be applied to the concept of language much, but there is an interesting article about it happening to kanji characters, which are the symbols used to write Japanese. The article is from 1996, and it’s in Japanese, so again, I’m reading a translation, this time on PubMed, but it says, “It is a well-known observation that when a Kanji character is viewed steadily and continuously, the viewer often becomes unable to recognize the Kanji as a whole pattern, and it becomes difficult to judge whether or not the Kanji is orthographically correct. Such a phenomenon is called the ‘Gestaltzerfall’ of Kanji characters.” It’s also a known phenomenon in Chinese, called “orthographic satiation.” This is thought to be different from semantic satiation because it’s not related to losing the meaning of the word but to not recognizing the shape of the character.
So jamais vu and Gestaltzerfall — both interesting things that are kind of like semantic satiation, but not quite.
This next segment about the period is by Joe Moran.
by Joe Moran (via The Conversation)
If you want to write a good sentence, you must learn to love the full stop. Love it above all other punctuation marks, and see it as the goal towards which the words in your sentence adamantly move.
A sentence, once begun, demands its own completion. As pilots say: take-off is optional, landing is compulsory. A sentence throws a thought into the air and leaves the reader vaguely dissatisfied until that thought has come in to land.
We read a sentence with the same part of our brains that processes music. Like music, a sentence arranges its elements into an order that should seem fresh and alive and yet shaped and controlled. A good sentence will often frustrate readers just a little, and put them faintly on edge, without ever suggesting that it has lost control of what is being said. As it runs its course, it will assuage some of the frustration and may create more. But by the end, things should have resolved themselves in a way that allows something to be said.
Only when the full stop arrives can the meaning of a sentence be fulfilled. The full stop offers the reader relief, allowing her to close the circle of meaning and take a mental breath.
Full stops also give writing its rhythm. They come in different places, cutting off short and long groups of words, varying the cadences – those drops in pitch at the sentence’s end which signal that the sentence, and the sentiment, are done.
A sentence wields more power with a strong stress at the end, where it sticks in the mind and sends a backwash over the words that went before. Weak sentences have weak predicates that come to the full stop with an unresounding phhtt. If you say that something is “an interesting factor to consider” or “should be borne in mind”, then the end of your sentence is just mumbly noise, because those things could be said about anything. A sentence with a strong end-stress says that its maker cared how its words fell on the reader’s ear. It feels fated to end thus, not just strung out to fill the word count.
A good trick, when drafting a piece, is to press enter after every sentence, as if you were writing a poem and each full stop marked a line break. This renders the varied (or unvaried) lengths of your sentences instantly visible. And it foregrounds the full stop, reminding you of its power as the destination and final rest of each sentence. Winston Churchill wrote his speeches like this, in single-sentence lines, to more easily adjust his Augustan rhythms. If you keep pressing enter after every full stop, the music of your writing is easier to hear because now it can also be seen.
We live in an age when the full stop is losing its power. The talky, casual prose of texting and online chat often manages without it. A single-line text needs no punctuation to show that it has ended. Instead of a full stop, we press send. Omitting the full stop gives off an extempore air, making replies seem insouciant and jokes unrehearsed.
But writing is not conversation, nor a speech-balloon text awaiting a response. A written sentence must give words a finished form that awaits no clarification. It must be its own small island of sense, from which the writer has been airlifted and on which no one else need live. We write alone, as an act of faith in words as a way of speaking to others who are elsewhere. So a sentence must be self-supporting. It must go out into the world without the author leaning over the reader to clarify its meaning. Hence the full stop.
A sentence is also a social animal; it feeds off its neighbours to form higher units of sense. It needs a full stop not just to be a sentence, but so the next one can begin. Studies have shown that young people tend to read a full stop in a text as curt or passive-aggressive. On social media, a full stop is often used between every word to sound angrily emphatic: End. Of. Story. But in writing, a full stop is not meant to be the final word in an argument like this. It is a satisfying little click that moves the dial along so the next sentence can pick up where it left off. Its end is also a beginning.
That segment was by Joe Moran, a professor of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University. It originally appeared on The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
Finally, I have a familect story from Janet.
"Hi my name is Janet. I'm from Lincoln, Nebraska. My husband uses a CPAP, and he needs to have something to keep his mouth from falling open while he’s asleep. So we got him a chin strap, and the first time he put it on, I was reminded of the ghostly character in ‘A Christmas Carol,’ and the chin strap has been called a Marley ever since. Thanks. Bye bye."
Thanks, Janet. That’s a perfect little story. Thanks for sharing!
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice quiet place, and we might play it on the show.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, Thanks to our audio engineer Nathan Semes, and our director of podcasts Adam Cecil. To our ad operations specialist Morgan Christianson, our marketing associate Davina Tomlin, and our digital operations specialist Holly Hutchings, who would love to scuba dive but is terrified of deep water.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.