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Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, [1] who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a long time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
The political world has diluted the meanings of words and phrases so effectively (and, in some cases, done a full gaslight on phrases like “fake news”) that it has blunted the impact of some ...
The English word 'lose' reasonably looks like it should be pronounced as 'lose' to Germans, as in German the lone 's' often has the sound of an English 'z', and a lone 'o' in English very seldom has the 'oo' sound.
In his book, When Words Lose Their Meaning, he argues that words of persuasion and identification define community and civic life. He states that words produce "the methods by which culture is maintained, criticized, and transformed". [15] Rhetoric remains relevant as a civic art.
Many natural language words have idiomatic origins but are assimilated and so lose their figurative senses. For example, in Portuguese, the expression saber de coração 'to know by heart', with the same meaning as in English, was shortened to 'saber de cor', and, later, to the verb decorar, meaning memorize.
Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another (given) language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap.
The values the Republican Party once cherished and promoted have been corrupted and abandoned
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).