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Word salad


Word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgment by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

Word salad may describe a symptom of neurological or psychiatric conditions in which a person attempts to communicate an idea, but words and phrases that may appear to be random and unrelated come out in an incoherent sequence instead. Often, the person is unaware that he or she did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia, as well as after anoxic brain injury. Clang associations are especially characteristic of mania, as seen in bipolar disorder, as a somewhat more severe variation of flight of ideas. In extreme mania, the patient's speech may become incoherent, with associations markedly loosened, thus presenting as a veritable word salad.

It may be present as:

Word salad can be generated by a computer program for entertainment purposes by inserting randomly chosen words of the same type (nouns, adjectives, etc.) into template sentences with missing words, a game similar to Mad Libs.

Another way of generating meaningless text is Mojibake, also called Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") in German, in which an assortment of seemingly random text is generated through character encoding incompatibility in which one set of characters are replaced by another, though the effect is more effective in languages where each character represents a word, such as Chinese, than a letter.


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