Word salad
Word salad is language with meaningless, scrambled words. It is unintelligible, which means a listener cannot find any meaning in the spoken sentence.[1] The words in the sentence may or may not be in grammatically correct order.
'Word salad' is most often seen as a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The term is often used in psychiatry and theoretical linguistics to describe language which native speakers judge is meaningless.
In mental health diagnoses
[change | change source]Word salad occurs in neurological or psychological cases in which a person tries to communicate, and words and phrases come out – but make no sense. Often, the person is unaware that the words they spoke did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia,[2] and after anoxic brain injury.
It may be present as:
- Receptive aphasia: damage to brain centres dealing with language.[3]
- Schizophasia: incoherent babbling, sometimes a symptom of schizophrenia.
- Logorrhea: a mental condition characterized by excessive talking.
- Graphorrhea: a written version of word salad, rarer than logorrhea in schizophrenics.[4]
In computing
[change | change source]Word salad can be generated by a computer program for various purposes.[5]
Mojibake, also called Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") in German, is an effect similar to word salad, in which an assortment of seemingly-random text is generated.
Lorem ipsum is a dummy text that is mainly used to show what text on a page or website would look like.
Related pages
[change | change source]References
[change | change source]- ↑ "Definition of "word salad". Oxford University Press. 2012. Archived from the original on 2013-11-04. Retrieved 2014-08-07.
- ↑ Shives, Louise Rebraca (2008). Basic concepts of psychiatric-mental health nursing. Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer / Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-7817-9707-8.
- ↑ "Merck Manual". merckmanuals.com. Merck Publishing. Retrieved 2014-12-06.
- ↑ Geschwind, Norman (1974). Selected papers on language and the brain (2. print. ed.). Dordrecht ; Boston: Reidel. p. 80. ISBN 9789027702623.
- ↑ Berinato, Scott (April 2007). "The scourge of image spam: image spam techniques". Cso : The Resource for Security Executives. 6 (4). CXO Media Inc. ISSN 1540-904X.