(Hermes Rivera via Unsplash)
The hazards of communicating by email are well known: the precision of word choice matters when the tone of voice is absent. This is why the emojis that accompany phone texts are so vital. Emojis crown our messages with a tone marked by whatever yellow-headed expression we choose. But for true understanding and nuance, we must speak with our voices.
The inverse of relying too much on the sound of voice, divorced from the meaning of words, is that when we try hard enough to move beyond the confines of words’ meaning, they can transform into stand-alone sounds, miniatures of assonance and vibration. You may already know there is a term for this phenomenon. It is called “semantic satiation,” coined by psychologist Leon Jakobovits James in 1962, but extending across centuries by other names and terms, reaching all the way back to James Boswell in 1782: “Words, the representations, or rather signs of ideas and notions in the human race, though habitual to all of us, are, when abstractly considered, exceedingly wonderful; in so much, that by endeavouring to think of them with a spirit of intense inquiry, I have been affected even with giddiness and a kind of stupor, the consequence of having one’s faculties stretched in vain,” Boswell wrote in his essay “On Words.”
My middle-school friends knew this phenomenon well when we stopped a group conversation to reflect on how bizarrely some words waltzed along sound waves. These were words so curiously charming that they induced continual repetition, with each pronunciation emphasizing a word’s aural punchline. “Grizzly” was a particular favorite, as if it somehow depicted a ferocious brown bear turning a sawmill upside down. My friends and I nearly laughed ourselves senseless every time we said it. “Moist,” which somehow merged an instant-cake TV advertisement with the alien skin of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., was another hit. The very sound of the word conveyed a cloying mix of stagnant dew across an imaginary substance of rancid, unknown origin. It was a word you might find in the hidden corner of an obituary embalming room, smiling at you in a desperate attempt to look cute. Instead, it only succeeded in making you wish you could crawl out of your own skin.
The search for the most beautiful words in the English language has recently become something of a cottage industry on the internet, with commentators remarking on J.R.R. Tolkien’s and H.L. Mencken’s love affair with the words “cellar door,” President Trump’s perpetual seduction by the word “beautiful,” and famous New York attorney James Shea’s list of twenty-one all-time favorites. Even ChatGPT is in on the game.
To contemplate the phenomenon of semantic satiation at length is to create the phenomenon it describes. To say a word once is to know it. To say it repeatedly, or bludgeon it by overuse and repetition, is to somehow surrender it to our senses, void of comprehension. This makes little sense, but it works. And at a powerful level that blues and rock singers understand. The repetition of their song lyrics in a chorus may be protected against loss of meaning by the music undergirding them. However, there is no denying the mysterious power of their repetition. The song “She’s Lost Control” by Joy Division may be the best possible example of how this works. In a song about losing control, it is singer Ian Curtis who emerges to control receptive listeners.
To move from stringing words together in declarative statements to dwelling on them in isolation is to move from a world where we maintain the illusion of controlling words to one where words seemingly control us by their individual, enchanting qualities of sound. Words need the company of other words, preferably lots of them, else they fall into a strange pit of meaningless, yet mind-altering sound. Like us, words are social when mingling in tantalizing combinations, and perilously, curiously lonely, but still attractive, by themselves.
