This is a blog. I don’t really know what a blog is, I don’t blog, I don’t read blogs, I don’t know how to blog, I don’t care for blogs, blogging or bloggers. This is a blog. I am now blogging away on my blog.

What’s that thing where you say a word so many times it starts to lose meaning and sound weird? Semantic satiation. See what I did there? I posed the question as if I didn’t already have the answer. See what I did there after the thing I did there? I posed a rhetorical question? Ok, I’ll stop.

Poorly executed segue.

Today’s blog is going to be about that thing. That semantic satiation thing.   As the great philosopher Jon Lovitz said in that Friends episode. “…tartlets tartlets tartlets, [the] word has lost all meaning.”

Semantic satiation is the phenomenon in which repeating a word or phrase over and over and over and over again causes it to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who perceives the word/s as meaningless sounds. The term ‘semantic satiation’ was coined in 1962 by this guy in his doctoral thesis. If you are abnormally interested you can read it here but I wouldn’t recommend it.

The dissertation presents experiments that demonstrate the semantic satiation effect. In each experiment, subjects would repeat a word for several seconds, then perform a cognitive task that involved using that word, for example grouping words into similar contexts – apple should be grouped with words like orange, banana, pear and not driveshaft, combustion, differential. It was demonstrated through these experiments that repeating a word just before the task made the task more difficult.

The explanations I could find for this were for the most part, pseudoscience, so let’s not dwell on that. Instead, I’d like to bring your attention to a string of words that may induce the sensation if you look at them long enough.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”

This sentence really demonstrates how confusing the English language can be sometimes, especially if you’re an American. It’s a grammatically correct sentence (in American English) used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can create complex linguistic constructs. The wiki article is surprisingly good at explaning this, but basically, the sentence uses three meanings of the word buffalo.

• the city of Buffalo, New York,
• the REALLY rare verb to buffalo, meaning “to bully or intimidate” and
• the American buffalo (a species of bison)

Paraphrased, the sentence is, “Bison from Buffalo, that bison from Buffalo bully, themselves bully bison from Buffalo.” the reason it’s so difficult to read is mostly because it’s unpunctuated and uses literary techniques like restrictive clauses and reduced relative clauses. If you’re getting bored at this point, don’t fear…I won’t go into any of this.

Another lexically ambiguous example is an easier one to wrap your head around (and one that seems to appear in tests when the tester decides to be particularly cruel).

“James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher“

This can be easily understood if we add a bit of grammar. James and John had two different answers on their tests, their answer being ‘had’ and ‘had had’. If anyone can think of a question which might lead two people of sound mind to these answer variations, please let me know.

“James, while John had had “had“, had had “had had”; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher.”

My personal favourite one of these is the lion-eating poet in the stone den. Get a friend who’s fluent in Mandarin to read it to you. Here is a Pinyin extract “…Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī..” You get the idea.

• Final link/s. If you want to feel like you’re having a mild stroke, watch this. There truly is a subreddit for everything.
• Final words.  Did you know ‘segue’ was spelled ‘segue’? The more you know…knowledge is power, read a book blog.
• Final word. Giraffe.

Sarcastically yours ❤