Lexical inflation

From PsychWiki - A Collaborative Psychology Wiki

Lexical inflation is a loss of worth and meaning of the words and their inadequate usage as a consequence of psycho-functional inversion of the body orifices (mouth/anus/vagina/penis), brain pathology (e.g. Wernicke's aphasia) or mental retardation. Introduced by Dr. Andrej Poleev, this term should replace other related terms: word approximation and malapropism. There are two examples for synonymic use of the word inflation known from other fields: 1. A decline in the value of money due to superfluous emission. 2. An increase in the number of species that is not caused by new discoveries, but by changes in the classification of existing organisms (taxonomic inflation).

References

• Victor Klemperer. Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, 1947.
• S. Swarup, A. Apolloni, Z. Fagyal. Degree-biased Voter Model with Innovation: Modeling Lexical Inflation. Proceeding of AAMAS2011.
• Psychiatric Disorders - Wikibook
• Randolph B. Schiffer, Stephen M. Rao, Barry S. Foge. Neuropsychiatry, 2003.