Lapse of Meaning

Often, as I write this blog, I lose all sense of meaning. There I am, blogging away about one particular word until I've written it so many times that it stops being a word and becomes instead just a jumble of letters. As in "The word dog was first used for dogs in the dog days and dog became the common word for dog when dogs were first introduced to dog land. Dogs are dogged and so they dog other dogs until dogb..."

Then I throw myself down upon the divan with my smelling salts and linger there, panting, until the word dog has regained significance.

There is a term for this. In fact there are several:

Inhibition
Refractory phase and mental fatigue
Lapse of meaning
Word decrement
Cortical inhibition
Adaptation
Extinction
Satiation
Reactive inhibition
Stimulus satiation
Verbal transformation

My favourite of these is lapse of meaning. I am now going to repeat the phrase until I go mad.

The Inky Fool reads the dictionary