satiation

over exposure

TRANSLATION

satiation = Sättigung, Übersättigung, Befriedigung

STATISTICS

IN THE PRESS

“China has been growing for a long time and now this is some kind of SATIATION, said Sergey Katyrin, the president of Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who has played a role in facilitating trade relations between his country and China.

Bloomberg (23rd August 2023)

“My connection with my Indian heritage is not reflected in the South West and being a young person of colour I do not see my voice sought out, represented or heard. This has resulted in an identity crisis and sense of loneliness which has only been SATIATED by finding resilience in the local wild natural landscape.”

University of Exeter (1st September 2022)

Did you
know?

satiate / satiation
verb / noun

- to satisfy (a need, a desire, etc.) fully or to excess

- to completely satisfy yourself or a need, especially with food or pleasure, so that you could not have any more

Cambridge Dictionary / Merriam-Webster


WORD ORIGIN

The word "satiate" finds its roots in the Latin language from the verb satiare which means "to fill full”. This verb, in turn, stems from the Latin adjective satis which simply translates to "enough”.

So, when something is satiated, it has been filled enough, to the point of satisfaction.


VOCABULARY SATIATION

Why do words lose their meaning if you keep repeating them?

Have you noticed that if you keep hearing, or reading, the same word over and over, it can suddenly stop making sense? Such words needn't be unfamiliar or new vocabulary, it’s usually ordinary words you know well,... words like “flower”, or “castle”, or “angel”.

Psychologists call this strange feeling “semantic satiation” which is a technical way of saying “word overload”. The first description of the sensation appeared in 1907, when a psychology journal described the way a word “takes on a curiously strange and foreign aspect” when you see it over and over.

We now know that semantic satiation is a type of “brain fatigue” caused by neurons needing increasingly more energy to fire when the same stimulus is repeated. This also explains why we filter out, and eventually cease to hear, continuous, unchanging background noise.

And that’s another good reason to use synonyms to highlight, underline, or emphasise a message, a statement, or an appeal,.... rather than simply repeating the same word over and over and over again.


SYNONYMS

appeased, assuaged, brimful, bursting, contented, cloyed, engorged, filled, full to bursting, full up, fulfilled, gorged, glutted, gratified, happy, having one's fill, indemnified, indulged, jam-packed, lined tight, overfed, replete, sated, replete, sated, SATIATED, satisfied, stuffed, surfeited, topped up, replete, well-fed (-filled, -satisfied, -stocked, -supplied, -nourished)


SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

"To understand its meaning, overload your lexical circuits by repeating the word SATIATION over and over again."


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