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Comment by mpalmer | Hacker News Reader

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mpalmer·

We need the Oscars "In Memoriam" every year, but it's for words we lost to semantic satiation.

Off the top of my head:

iconic

epic

brilliant

"blazingly fast"

literally

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This is about repeating the word many times in isolation of other words, not using an exaggeration for lesser things so the meaning drifts. I think everyone's familiar with it by trying to say the same word over and over again, it quickly becomes weird and seems to lose its meaning or even become hard to say.

GP is engaging in the iconic HN tradition of commenting something brilliant that has nothing to do with TFA. Literally seconds later, someone has to point out the epic failure. I've been reading HN for 17 years, and I must lament that it is turning "blazingly fast" into reddit. Because of people like me, I guess :)

Is that more or less frequent than the HN anti-pattern: "I thought this was about..." as if that being wrong about what article was about was in any way interesting?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666558

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39436430

Ouch. I've been reading and commenting for years here, but I don't presume to gatekeep, or indeed lament that it's turning into reddit(?), the latter being distinctly against the HN commenting guidelines. Just downvote me and move on, you've got the karma for it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I upvoted you, and definitely didn't mean any offence

My bad, I misread both your tone and your meaning, an impressive combo. Cheers -

At this point "blazingly fast" is just marketing noise. Any product whose page does not use the phrase must be abominably slow.

This is not what semantic satiation is about

"State of the art"

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