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Is this what happens with words losing their entire meaning with propaganda? Not going to quote a specific word, but I live in a country that has gone into pro

by Yoric 2y ago

Is this what happens with words losing their entire meaning with propaganda? Not going to quote a specific word, but I live in a country that has gone into propaganda overdrive during the last few weeks and people who should know better (quite possibly including myself) are starting to use words to mean anything and their opposite.

JohnMakin 2y ago
how woke of you /s
chimpanzee 2y ago
No, this is about how a repeated word can lose familiarity and meaning entirely. In particular, the audible and visible forms become unfamiliar, as though it is no longer a legitimate word at all and instead sounds and appears like pure nonsense or of another unknown language.
cynicalkane 2y ago
No, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu... is a good essay on the use of propaganda to destroy language, and the natural process with which it's bought into.
gryn 2y ago
The closer one would be semantic drift, But a very specific kind of drift. Semantic dilution / diffusion ? It's the reason expertise fields end up creating new terms with time. The old terms discriminatory sharpness decrease with time as they get more popular and used in more and more places. I guess the end game for a language would be when you can no longer tell apart yes and no even when taking into account the sourounding context. I wonder it there are people who do this kind of linguistic research using information theory, doing a quantified tracking of the collapse of expressivity of terms and more generally languages.
- mistermann 2y ago
  > I guess the end game for a language would be when you can no longer tell apart yes and no even when taking into account the sourounding context. Like how (hard) Linguistic Relativity "is" "false".
deleted 2y ago
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MrVandemar 2y ago
> to mean anything and their opposite. That totally sucks. Or maybe it blows. Hard to know for sure.

by Yoric 2y ago

JohnMakin 2y ago

how woke of you /s

chimpanzee 2y ago

No, this is about how a repeated word can lose familiarity and meaning entirely. In particular, the audible and visible forms become unfamiliar, as though it is no longer a legitimate word at all and instead sounds and appears like pure nonsense or of another unknown language.

cynicalkane 2y ago

No, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu... is a good essay on the use of propaganda to destroy language, and the natural process with which it's bought into.

gryn 2y ago

The closer one would be semantic drift, But a very specific kind of drift. Semantic dilution / diffusion ? It's the reason expertise fields end up creating new terms with time. The old terms discriminatory sharpness decrease with time as they get more popular and used in more and more places. I guess the end game for a language would be when you can no longer tell apart yes and no even when taking into account the sourounding context. I wonder it there are people who do this kind of linguistic research using information theory, doing a quantified tracking of the collapse of expressivity of terms and more generally languages.

mistermann 2y ago
> I guess the end game for a language would be when you can no longer tell apart yes and no even when taking into account the sourounding context. Like how (hard) Linguistic Relativity "is" "false".

deleted 2y ago

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MrVandemar 2y ago

> to mean anything and their opposite. That totally sucks. Or maybe it blows. Hard to know for sure.