Apr 12, 2005

spi-rit. spir-it. spirit.

What is the term for that strange feeling you get when an utterly familiar word becomes unrecognizable? I just experienced it while posting a comment about the word "spirit." I looked at it, and it had lost its word-ness, and was now a random string of letters.

It's similar to the Capgras delusion, one of the strangest of a strange family of mental disorders, but without the attendant paranoia, perhaps because it is so fleeting.

Is there a word or phrase for it, though? A "vocab delusion?" "Lexical misidentification syndrome?"

3 comments:

eRobin said...

Sounds like an aphasiac moment. That happens to me too. And if I think too much about typing as I type, I can't type. That really freaks me out.

Jim Anderson said...

There's an interesting little tidbit about that sort of "procedural memory loss" here.

tm said...

It's totally weird when that happens. I s'pose the proper term is 'uncanny.'