In 1986, I went with a college friend to what was called Panorama Centre in Saddar, Karachi. Panorama, at the time, was a ‘posh’ place with lavish offices and high-end clothing shops.
When we were about to enter one of the elevators in the building, the door opened and a moustachioed man emerged carrying a five- or six-year-old boy. They were followed by three more burly men who seemed to be his assistants. As they were stepping out of the lift, the child announced: ‘’Dunya gol hai [the world is round].” The assistants all smiled widely and clapped, saying “Zabardast, zabardast [Wonderful].”
After about 30 minutes of loitering on the second floor, we pressed the ‘down’ button on the lift. The door slid open, and out came the same posse. Lo and behold, the kid announced: “Dunya gol hai.” Again, the assistants clapped and praised the kid.
Words and phrases lose their meaning or relevance when repeated ad nauseam
Some 15 minutes later when we were about to exit the building from a glass door near a clothes outlet, we clearly heard it again: “Dunya gol hai”. It came from inside the shop. But this time it wasn’t followed by any claps or praise.
This irrelevant memory came to mind when recently I read Verbal Conditioning and Behaviour, a book by psychologist J.P. Das. According to Das when a word or phrase is vigorously repeated, it loses its meaning to the listener who then begins to perceive it as meaningless. In 1962, Leon James, a professor of psychology called this phenomenon “semantic satiation.”
Interestingly, though conducted decades ago, James’ work on the subject is only now being fully absorbed by an active service industry which, for years, underlined the importance of repeated messages. That industry is advertising.
Author and journalist Zachary Petit, in his 2015 article for Mental Floss, writes, “Marketers are rethinking their sales ploys, thanks to Leon’s ideas.” For example, the term “Black Friday” once held a unique meaning for shoppers, but, according to Petit, “thanks to its overuse, Black Friday is no longer the valuable hook it once was.”
Another interesting example can be the word ‘revolution’. In 1995, a journalist colleague of mine and I took up a project after noticing the frequency of the word revolution/revolutionary in press ads. We scanned various editions of Dawn newspaper (at the daily’s library) from 1950 till 1995.
Our findings indicated that the word ‘revolution’ was only sparsely used till the late 1960s, mainly for actual political revolutions. However, by the late 1960s, the word was frequently repeated by both, left and right mainstream political parties, and even some youth groups. Then in a mid-1970s edition of Dawn, we came across a press ad of a furniture brand that claimed its office chairs were made with “revolutionary Swedish technology!”