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About Word Salad

sackett

Barely Tolerated Lampooneer
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Lately we've seen some posts hereabouts that various of us have called word salad. Perhaps a clinical psychologist would be a little slower than a layman to use the term, but I think he'd eventually characterize the posts I'm thinking of in that way.

Text in the form of "an apparently confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them" (I'm quoting the Wiki article) makes irritating reading, as we all know, and it's a waste of time to try to find paraphrasible meaning in it -- and equally a waste of time to challenge the poor soul who typed it to paraphrase it, or to define the terms used. At first we ridicule, then we pity, finally we ignore.

But I wonder: Would it be possible to use textual analysis to tease some significance out of word salad? Simple word counts might be a way to start, to the extent that the inventory of words the sufferer uses might reveal something about his obsessions and confusions. Perhaps more sophisticated tools for analyzing sentences would uncover repeated linkages of terms (you can't call them ideas; or can you?) that could give a therapist a glimpse, a hint, that he could use to get inside these undoubtedly tormented minds, and possibly start to help them.

Have clinicians ever tried, say, working with Natural Language Toolkit on a salad text?
 
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Having worked with lots of head injury patients and stroke patients, I can say I've seen far too many people trying to tease meaning out of the nonsense patients tend to spew.

It'd be neat if there were a tool to put meaning together, but that sort of necessitates that there was clear meaning, a message, to begin with.

I think a lot of what patients say is just a jumbled mess of thought-words and phrases. They often want... something, I think often they don't know what. Just a desire for something. Since their normal desire/fulfillment abilities are inhibited, they generate a lot of raw emotion.

Very often, however, a doctor will tell me there's no there in there.
 
Monketey Ghost said:
Having worked with lots of head injury patients and stroke patients, I can say I've seen far too many people trying to tease meaning out of the nonsense patients tend to spew.

It'd be neat if there were a tool to put meaning together, but that sort of necessitates that there was clear meaning, a message, to begin with.

I think a lot of what patients say is just a jumbled mess of thought-words and phrases. They often want... something, I think often they don't know what. Just a desire for something. Since their normal desire/fulfillment abilities are inhibited, they generate a lot of raw emotion.

Very often, however, a doctor will tell me there's no there in there.
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Thank you for your lucid if disheartening response. But: I wouldn't expect textual analysis to work on non-text material. I was thinking of trying to help people who can at least post on an internet forum, however brain-damaged they may seem to us in our exasperation. I daren't name any names, you understand.

Also, I didn't mean to suggest that actual meaning might be found. Rather, I wonder if significant linkages and vocabularies might be compiled that, combined with other data, could be used to frame a therapeutic approach.

But I'm starting to write like a shrink, which I sure ain't.
 
I think a recent poster isn't coherent, but it's not exactly word salad, as in schizophrenia, or brain damage.

Maybe it's:

>English as second language, and

>Immersion in vocabulary of mysticism or esotericism, and

>Lack of education, especially science education, and

>Resentment (of lots of things, including the powers that be), and

>Paranoid tendencies, if not paranoid personality disorder, and

>Desire for a grand style, and

>Imitation of a scientific or logical style, and

>Stress or excitement about posting here.


If one lets one's mind go into a sort of soft focus, it's possible to make a kind of broad sense out of it. But one resists, because so much is made up, or just plain wrong. And one resists, because the effort is too great, and too dispiriting. There's nothing to be gained by examining it too closely.

It would be possible to make a sort of "word cloud" diagram, with arrows connecting things. By this I mean to agree with what you're saying about vocabularies and linkages, maybe.

We've all heard this stuff many times before: The evil elites control scientific research and are irradiating the downtrodden masses. But Logic (that is, a strange codeword for "good") will prevail.

It's not all that hard, but we don't really want to go there.

Actual word salad is more about sound, klanging, etc. More pseudo-poetic. (I think.)
 
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Pretty much agree with you and pretty sure I know about whom we are talking - though there are at least 3-4 who have similar difficulties.
 
calebprime said:
<snip>

>Immersion in vocabulary of mysticism or esotericism, and

>Lack of education, especially science education, and

>Resentment (of lots of things, including the powers that be), and

>Paranoid tendencies, if not paranoid personality disorder, and

>Desire for a grand style, and

...

>Stress or excitement about posting here.
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Your points are well-taken. I would, however, contend that the above list describes a genuine mental condition that might be treatable. If it is, then addressing the text that the patient produces would be in order.

Mind you, I wouldn't expect the therapist to go into any very detailed analysis of said text. I'd find software to do to that, i.e., I'd let a robot do it. As you imply, there's no point in multiplying the anguish.

Yesterday, I bounced my little idea off an honest-to-pete psychologist. He made polite noises and then commented on the weather. But I'm an opinionated layman and used to that; I don't want to give up quite yet.
 
I'm not sure that it matters what exact words or concepts a mentally ill person focuses on. I had contact with a mentally ill man who constantly talked about George Bush and continued to do so long after the man left office. Although his fixation helped doctors diagnose him, it didn't matter to them exactly what he was fixated on.

So, what type of mental illness would be treatable with this approach?
 
I've known people over the years who used LSD too many times. Conversations with them resemble schizophrenic-on-the-bus conversations but with an underlying internal logic. The groundwork of the logic may be utterly mad but if you can wrap your head around it the rest of the conversation is easier. Not, in my opinion, worth a second or third date, though.
 
sackett said:
Lately we've seen some posts hereabouts that various of us have called word salad. Perhaps a clinical psychologist would be a little slower than a layman to use the term, but I think he'd eventually characterize the posts I'm thinking of in that way.
Click to expand...

Word salad? Your discursive post belies your contradictory impulse to impugn. Maybe your knowledge of laymen has affected your knowledge of clinical psychologists? Maybe predicting characterization is something you are poor at. Word salad is a word to dismiss the premise.

Text in the form of "an apparently confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them" (I'm quoting the Wiki article) makes irritating reading, as we all know, and it's a waste of time to try to find paraphrasible meaning in it -- and equally a waste of time to challenge the poor soul who typed it to paraphrase it, or to define the terms used. At first we ridicule, then we pity, finally we ignore.
Click to expand...

Ignore at your peril. You may never know what the word quantum means if you ignore me. Neither will you know the words: Quiddity, sanguine or dollop. Meanings are subjective. Words don't capture meaning perfectly. Why should they be expected to? Paraphrase is just a word. What comes to mind when you say "paraphrase?" Nothing right? Because it has no meaning.
 
As to the patient's subject matter (my sympathies to a poor fellow obsessing on Geo. Bush), I agree that that's of less initial importance than the evidence of obsession itself. But the sufferer's inventory of subjects might yield clues to his clinical history; it might, if characterized carefully, be of use in treatment.

As to "underlying internal logic": If such a thing can be discerned in a sick person's effusions, then a therapist would be ahead by that much anyway. If the logic can be quantified, precisely, one hopes, then it might , with a large enough sample of patients, reveal an underlying mechanism of delusion.

I don't like all those mights, but this is pretty early days.

But after Senex's masterly refutation, I have little to say; that icon stuns me every time.
 
Ive often thought that psych profiles could be done off of the body of a person's internet postings. They aren't quite free-association, but are done only in response to internal forces. Could be quite telling.
 
sackett said:
Lately we've seen some posts hereabouts that various of us have called word salad. Perhaps a clinical psychologist would be a little slower than a layman to use the term, but I think he'd eventually characterize the posts I'm thinking of in that way.

Text in the form of "an apparently confused usage of words with no apparent meaning or relationship attached to them" (I'm quoting the Wiki article) makes irritating reading, as we all know, and it's a waste of time to try to find paraphrasible meaning in it -- and equally a waste of time to challenge the poor soul who typed it to paraphrase it, or to define the terms used. At first we ridicule, then we pity, finally we ignore.

But I wonder: Would it be possible to use textual analysis to tease some significance out of word salad? Simple word counts might be a way to start, to the extent that the inventory of words the sufferer uses might reveal something about his obsessions and confusions. Perhaps more sophisticated tools for analyzing sentences would uncover repeated linkages of terms (you can't call them ideas; or can you?) that could give a therapist a glimpse, a hint, that he could use to get inside these undoubtedly tormented minds, and possibly start to help them.

Have clinicians ever tried, say, working with Natural Language Toolkit on a salad text?
Click to expand...

Could this mean the incomparable Adele Nazeem might not be her real name? ;)
 
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sackett said:
But after Senex's masterly refutation, I have little to say; that icon stuns me every time.
Click to expand...

Yeah, well me and my friend were driving to the city and saw the car wreck and we said what the hell. That old dress always flattered the bottom. I took a black and white photograph class once and the teacher was big on foreground, mid-ground and after-ground on every photo and that the photo tell a story. This is an A+ intro to B&W photo photo.

Wait a second. That's not me in the photo.
 
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I posted a blast of word salad in forum community as part of the April Fool's thread. Figured it as a tribute to a recently departed member.

It just lay there like a dead fish, uncommented. Maybe people thought it was normal for me? :D
 
deadrose said:
I posted a blast of word salad in forum community as part of the April Fool's thread. Figured it as a tribute to a recently departed member.

It just lay there like a dead fish, uncommented. Maybe people thought it was normal for me? :D
Click to expand...

It was your reference to bestiality juice. It was just a little too creepy.

This is something you should leave to the professionals.
 
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