- Word salad
Word salad is a string of words that vaguely resembles language, and may or may not be grammatically correct, but is utterly meaningless. Examples of word salad include:
:"Wonder, why now? Like, there's this clever girl, and this clown right. They're throwing up for a circus, and when the point is dead. They got no place to go except between the business, and somewhere else called money."
Specifically:
*In the context of mental health (positive psychosis,schizophrenia ,formal thought disorder ), seeSchizophasia -- although today word salad is only rarely considered a symptom of schizophrenia, and when it does appear in a patient, it is usually during the regressed period of the illness.
*In the context ofclinical neuropsychology , seeReceptive aphasia . Unlike schizophasia, it is a symptom of neurological damage of brain, rather than schizophrenia.
*In the context ofcomputer science (e-mail spam filters and filter avoidance, etc.), seeWord salad (computer science) .
*Inlinguistics , this is used to illustrate the difference between syntax and meaning. See "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously ", which is a famous nonsensical yet grammatically correct sentence written byNoam Chomsky .
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