Happy Halloween! In tribute to the holiday (my favorite), here’s a smidge of spooky linguistics. Ever play that game where you repeat some word so many times it starts to lose its meaning? That’s actually a thing, called semantic satiation. Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon where a person temporarily loses the meaning of the…
You’re probably familiar with the old adage “the only thing that’s constant is change.” Still, so many people tend to think about language as a relatively fixed affair. I’ve said it before (and will inevitably say it again): all living languages change all the time, and at all levels – phonological (sounds!), morphological (word-bits!), lexical…
