Is anyone acquainted with this term used to refer to learning something new and then running across that same information a second time shortly thereafter? Anyone know why it takes its name from a German terrorist organization? ******************************************************************** 11-29-02, 03:29 PM Ewood27 Ewood say that, wouldn't he?
11-29-02, 03:42 PM sonnet26 I did a semi-lengthy search on Google, and only found this information:
Lex Baader-Meinhof, or the Baader-Meinhof Laws, went into effect on January 1, 1975. They were a series of laws that were designed specifically at the Baader-Meinhof defendants that were on trial in Stammheim. Among the new laws were provisions allowing for trials to continue in the absence of defendants, allowing for lawyers to be barred from trials for almost no reason, and other oppressive measures. (This came from Here ).
I thought the term was deja-vu. I'd never heard of the Baader-Meinhof Effect. Do you have this information, juanruiz, or are you looking for it?
I avidly await additional (nice alliteration, don't you think?) information. LOL
11-29-02, 03:52 PM kittypal Deja-vu is when you are doing or thinking something and you momentarily think "haven't I done this before?" An interesting tid-bit, I was told in a class once that they think deja-vu has something to do with very small seizure like occurences.
11-29-02, 04:06 PM maiku Off-shoots of the original Baader-Meinhof gang, particularly the RAF (German acronymn for Rote Army Faktion) were very active in the years I lived in Germany, and there were almost daily reports in the late 70's on their terrorist activities. But I never heard the term "Baader-Meinhof Effect" used in anything like the sense you have in mind.
This disgusting band of people certainly had a great effect on German law praxis, and on the minds of ordinary, generally very pacific-minded German people. If anything, their activities had just the opposite of the effect they wished for: they helped to discredit Marxism in Germany, both East and West, to the point that it is now a dead issue over there.
Unfortunately, it is now the resurgence of fascism in the form of skin-heads and other radical right-wing types that is most to be feared in Germany.
11-29-02, 04:10 PM juanruiz I'm not talking about having an experience you sense you've already had before. What I'm referring to is, say, discovering that a guy named Philo of Alexandria once existed, and then the next day something about him appears in the newspaper. Up to that time you knew nothing about him, and then suddenly his name comes up twice.
11-29-02, 06:42 PM maiku Nearly every person I've ever talked to has had the experience you're talking about, JR. It is always kind of startling when you recognize it. But it doesn't have nearly the emotional impact that the deja vu experience does. This is, of course, an entirely different thing, and it can be pretty mind-blowing when it happens.
I'm not sure that the original meaning of the French term is always properly understood. An experience of deja vu is not just any casual thought that you've done something before. It can be a deeply disturbing experience in which you think you are literally repeating some history you know happened before, and that you have maybe become trapped in some kind of time-warp. It is the kind of thing you have to have experienced yourself to truly appreciate. I think probably the majority of people do, though, at some time or other in their lives.
I don't know what the term is for the phenomenon you're asking about, or even that any generally used term exists. Considering how widely shared the experience is, though, there certainly should be. I just don't thing "Baader-Meinhof" effect is the right one.
11-30-02, 11:02 AM Monsterquizzer The psychologist, Jung, gave the specific name 'synchronicity' to the phenomenon of events which coincide in time and appear to be meaningfully related. Generally speaking, of course, such happenings are mere chance or coincidence...which means much the same as synchronicity in any case.
11-30-02, 12:22 PM cattywampus Now I'm thoroughly confused, and I suspect juanruiz is, too.
I think what he's referring to (correct me if I'm wrong, juan) is that phenomenon best described as: as soon as you buy a red Thunderbird, you will immediately see red Thunderbirds everywhere; if you meet and fall for a girl named Linda, you will at once meet 13 girls named Linda, etc. Of course there are no more red Thunderbirds than before, it's just that you've become supernaturally aware of them.
There's no name for this but there ought to be, who can think of a good one?
Catty (who can't think at all today, sorry) big grin
11-30-02, 01:28 PM Minnesota
quote:There's no name for this but there ought to be, who can think of a good one?
Well, if it isn't really the Baader-Meinhof Effect then I suggest that it henceforth be known as the Jauns-Again Phenomenon.
11-30-02, 01:49 PM babthrower I noticed it when I was a kid. I'd see a new word and look up the meaning. Then I'd see the same word, usually twice more, in close succession. Pretty spooky. I concluded that I must have seen the word before the incident which prompted me to look it up, but just hadn't noticed it.
But in adult life I still find it happens, and my childish rationalization doesn't work any more. My pet theory now is that it is a word which becomes current, for some reason, and several people use it. Sort of like both Wallace and Darwin coming up with evolution theory. The precursor concepts were current in nineteenth century circles.
I guess the next one will be Baader-Meinhof effect.
The correct term is 'spooky coincidence', Juan.
12-01-02, 04:28 AM Monsterquizzer In his 'Philo of Alexandria' post above, Juanruiz describes a situation in which something totally new is brought to his attention and - lo and behold - it is brought to his attention yet again almost immediately thereafter. Namely, the same unusual thing occurs twice closely in time and we assume that to be somehow meaningful. The fact that it isn't, but is merest chance, doesn't seem to matter to us. By all means call it 'spooky coincidence', but - since it fits perfectly - I cannot see why we need anything to describe/name it other than Jung's 'synchronicity'. 12-01-02, 01:30 PM babthrower I don't think we need a special name for every phenomenon.
What is the name of the state of mind of a person who has just eaten a squirrel and simultaneously remembers that he needs to install his snow tires? The reason this state of mind must have a special name is that it is unique?
12-01-02, 01:35 PM kittypal It does seem to happen a lot though!!!!
12-01-02, 01:48 PM maiku The phenomenon JR described is nearly universal, I'd guess, and it is very, very specific, always involving words or names. So in fact, there should be a name for it. But there still isn't.
MQ's suggestion of applying Jung's term synchronicity won't quite do. The class of events Jung had in mind with this term was much broader, and included, among other things, the right guesses mediums sometimes make as to what is going to happen in the near future.
Moreover, Jung hardly considered his concept of synchronicity as just another synonym for "coincidental." The relation between events Jung thought of as governed by synchronicity not only appears to be meaningful, it is in fact, meaningful, according to him, and he thought that meaningful patterns of co-occurring events were part of the structure of reality itself, beyond being explicable by laws of cause and effect or of mere chance.
Unlike Freud, with whom he often discussed the matter, Jung believed in the validity of what we call nowadays "paranormal" or "psychic" events. His notion of "synchronicity" was aimed at explaining why these happen, and why they aren't just coincidences. cool
12-01-02, 02:00 PM babthrower Maiku Yeah, but Jung was pretty spooky.
12-01-02, 02:04 PM kittypal I think that catty may have it. I do crosswords and so many times when I look up a word or information I never heard before I will read it in a book the next day or see it on T.V. We are probably just more aware.
12-01-02, 10:50 PM cattywampus Yeah, but it needs to be called something, as people talk about it and the explanation itself is too lengthy. I suggest "dribbit," as in: "I did a dribbit yesterday."
Catty (well, that's the only thing I could think of, she whined) razz
12-02-02, 03:21 AM Monsterquizzer I know there are some who don't always approve of etymologies offered by the OED, but let me quote what it says about 'synchronicity', nevertheless: "The name given by the Swiss psychologist, C.G. Jung (1875 - 1961) to the phenomenon of events which coincide in time and appear meaningfully related but have no discoverable causal connection." If that doesn't fit Juanruiz's 'Philo of Alexandria' scenario, I can't imagine what would, Jung's supernatural beliefs notwithstanding. What do you think, yourself, Juan?
12-02-02, 08:44 AM maiku That's one of the problems with being tied down to the OE as you are, MQ. I happen to own a copy, too. The difference is that yourdefinition comes only from the dictionary, apparently, whereas mine comes from a familiarity with the primary source.
12-02-02, 11:18 AM Monsterquizzer So, M, Jung chose to put a supernatural gloss on synchronous events such as we are discussing here...isn't that precisely what most people still do today? Indeed, if they were not seen as having, somehow, an element of the paranormal, why would people even note their occurrence? Of course, these happenings are all too credible, even inevitable, and there is nothing supernatural about them, as I already said. However, given that most of us still appear to feel exactly the same way about them as Jung apparently did, why the heck will his word for them...synchronicity...somehow "not quite do" as a name for us to apply to them?
12-02-02, 11:46 AM maiku We can agree, I think, MQ, that the phenomenon JR is describing is a species of what Jung called synchronicity. But this general term is far too broad. Jung meant it to cover a wide range of "psychic phenomena," including cases of veridical precognition, crisis apparitions (i.e., certain kinds of ghosts), and even clairvoyance. We distinguish among all of these types of "synchronicities," if that's what they are, because it is useful to know specifically what we're talking about (even if some of the discussants don't happen to believe there is anything supernatural about them.
I propose, then, that we could adopt the term "lexical synchronicity" to refer to JR's phenomenon, whatever its cause may be. smile
12-02-02, 02:17 PM babthrower Arrgh! Why are you insisting that there is 'meaning' in the phenomenon?
So a word is encountered several times within a narrow timeframe.
(1) Pure co-incidence (2) Cultural factors (e.g. a topic involving the concept has become current) (3) The word has been in use with normal frequency but you never noticed it before (4) Some spooky reason which we need to winkle out by deep philosophical speculation.
The only case in which there might be 'meaning' in the phenomenon is #4. The other three options are incidental.
Why do some people jump directly to #4 without even considering the other possibilities?
Why do some people see a cloud and notice its general similarity in shape to a sheep, and say to themselves "Isn't that interesting? Of all the shapes that something as plastic as a collection of water/ice droplets could assume after n random arrangements, I was lucky enough to be looking when it turned into a very rough approximation of the shape of a sheep?"
Others see the same thing and say to themselves "Lo, the lamb of god is coming soon!"
Yet others see the same thing and say to themselves "Hmmm. Must put $20 on Lambchop in the fifth race."
12-02-02, 02:48 PM maiku I agree with you almost entirely, babthrower. The phenomenon I've decided from now on to call "lexical synchronicity" may be quite readily dismissed for any of your reasons 1-3 above.
But if you imply that I, myself, insisted anywhere above on reading any supernatural significance into the phenomenon, you're wrong. I did not and I do not. I did want to say, in response to what I took to be MQ's misunderstanding of Jung's term, that Jung himself believed that these kind of phenomena could not be properly explicated by any of your causes 1-3 above (or by any cause at all), and that he himself believed this to be a highly significant fact about the structure of reality. I felt it important to point that out.
Still, the phenomenon is interesting, of wide occurrence, and ought to have a name.
I give you, therefore, lexical synchronicity. (Not Baader-Meinhof Effect). wink
12-03-02, 03:49 AM Monsterquizzer Yeah, I'll go with 'lexical synchronicity', Maiku, and - if it ever becomes the accepted name for the phenomenon - I trust the OED will eventually jointly credit us with the coinage, having provided 50% of it each. Cheers.
Lexical synchronicity is something completely different.
12-04-02, 09:51 AM Monsterquizzer The use of the phrase 'lexical synchronicity' in your link-site, Chancey, is not much different from the 'lexical synchronicity' of a group of children chanting a poem or a church choir singing a hymn...ie people using the same words at much the same time. That's not quite what we've been discussing on this thread. Since the apparently agreed usage here now is quite different - as you yourself point out - it could conceivably (albeit not very probably) still get into the OED as an original usage. (Incidentally, I'm pretty sure they don't actually pay people for their word/phrase coinages...so nobody was expecting to get rich!)
12-05-02, 09:03 AM chanceygardner Quoting from Maiku
"The phenomenon JR described is nearly universal, I'd guess, and it is very, very specific, always involving words or names."
and from MQ
"..'the phenomenon of events which coincide in time and appear meaningfully related but have no discernable causal connection'.."
This is exactly what is reflected in the link, where the same word, name or phrase is used and witnessed by several people but the source is not identified/identifiable.
The difference between the existing definition and the phenomenon described at the beginning of this thread concerns the number of people hearing/using the word, name or phrase. In the existing definition, the word, name or phrase is heard by many people and used by many people. The phenomenon described in this thread is unique to one person; they are the only ones that hear or use the word, name or phrase.
Perhaps you should call it personal or singular lexical synchronicity so that the phenomena are clearly distinguished.
12-05-02, 12:15 PM maiku Tut, tut right back at you, Chancey. If your claim is that MQ and I can't use the term "lexical synchronicity" in the sense appropriate to this discussion because it has been preempted by some inane webpage or other, then you make at least one of the following mistakes, possibly all of them:
(1) The term "synchronicity" in our sense was already preempted by Jung long before there ever were any websites at all, much less the one you cite, so that in fact it is your site which is misusing the term, not MQ and I, or,
(2) As I think MQ already said above, English very easily tolerates polysemy in its terms. That is to say, that it is almost never the case that a word has one and only one sense, and
(3) You put far too much trust in websites. The fact that some site can be discovered somewhere in cyberspace which uses the term in a sense different from ours tells us precisely nothing about any authority which that use can lay claim to.
And for the record, I doubt very much if the OED will cite either MQ or me for using the term on yet another website. My guess is that we'd have to get it into some kind of respectable hardcopy first. Na, und? cool
12-05-02, 02:04 PM steve It can be perceived that the usage of terms, whether by accident or coincidence, unavoidable as it may, be used on a website as justified by the fact that the user intended not to solicit a prior creator. This will in fact justify the user for publishing that which he or she deems to be of his or her own creation, not to be copied with or without his or her approval.
12-05-02, 02:45 PM maiku
quote:Originally posted by steve: It can be perceived that the usage of terms, whether by accident or coincidence, unavoidable as it may, be used on a website as justified by the fact that the user intended not to solicit a prior creator. This will in fact justify the user for publishing that which he or she deems to be of his or her own creation, not to be copied with or without his or her approval.
The above, on the other hand, is a paradigm example of lexical asynchronism, if not complete lexical dysfunction, linguistic syncope and disintegration. Diagnosis: SS (Steve syndrome). Etiology: likely lesions in Da Brocca's speech area in the left temporal lobe. Prognosis: not good, especially if the anti-social behavior patients with this disorder commonly exhibit along with their inability to communicate normally and with civility is allowed to continue without proper medication or surgery frown
12-05-02, 04:13 PM babthrower Originally posted by chanceygardner:
"Perhaps you should call it personal or singular lexical synchronicity so that the phenomena are clearly distinguished."
Good point. But a better one is whether this phenomenon ("learning something new and then running across that same information a second time shortly thereafter") can bear the weight of a name such as "singular lexical synchronicity" upon its slender shoulders. Even "lexical synchronicity" almost causes it to topple.
I still say 'spooky coincidence' is just fine.
My authority is the following sacred rule, called the "Rule of Neologistic Parsimony":
"No name or term may be devised to describe a phenomenon if the time it takes to pronounce the name or term is greater than the time it takes for the subject to experience the phenomenon."
12-06-02, 02:14 AM chanceygardner Maiku
Your desperation to defend your position against the fact that someone beat you to it (even on a dirty old website...but remember this is also a dirty old website) is amusing.
Creating a new word or term would be the epitome of your career on the board wouldn't it? Finding out the term already existed must have been a terrible blow to your ego and the tone of your reply betrays this.
I don't say that you can't use the term, but your claim to be the (co-)inventor is obviously false.
[This message was edited by chanceygardner on 12-06-02 at 02:26 AM.]
12-06-02, 03:10 AM Monsterquizzer Chancey, 'Gay' and 'gai', its immediate precursor, have been around for the best part of a millennium. Its first recorded use in print in English comes from the early 1300s. Then, it meant 'lively/cheerful' and went on meaning that - with a few offshoots mainly suggesting various naughtinesses - for over 500 years. It was not until the 1930s that it started to take on the meaning it now (more or less exclusively) has. The point is that the OED records each and every one of these modifications of meaning. The fact that words/phrases have already been used in a given sense in no way precludes their inclusion in the OED when used in a new sense. Your website's 'lexical synchronicity' is as like ours as 'new gay' is to 'old gay'. (By the way, my suggestion that Maiku and I might find ourselves so included was written tongue-in-cheek! Now look where it's got us!)
12-06-02, 05:29 AM chanceygardner MQ
As you can see in my previous post, I've not said that you cannot use the term, but that the term has already been used.
"..I give you, therefore, lexical synchronicity."
If you create a new meaning for a term, fine. But claiming a new term, no. wink
12-06-02, 10:20 AM Monsterquizzer Life really is too short. Over to you, Maiku, if you can be bothered. For me, ze vorr iss ofer!
12-06-02, 12:33 PM maiku You're right, MQ. But I'm an inveterate teacher, and I'd like to give it one last shot.
I looked up the site you linked above, Chancey, and I'm sorry to have to tell you that the author of the article displayed there has clearly misused the phrase "lexical synchronicity." It should have been "lexical synchronism," an entirely different thing. The author is obviously quite unaware of Jung's earlier use of the term "synchronicity," and is therefore guilty of a solecism. It is not a new coinage of anything at all. In the intended sense (entirely different from mine and MQ's), it is a confusion.
Neither MQ nor I considered our use of a modifier in front of an already accepted term in order to narrow its reference to be a "coinage" of a new term (much less expected any kind of reward for inventiveness). We were simply following pre-existing rules of English syntax to modify the reference of the term. Such extensions of reference are what produce new, but related, meanings all the time in English, and is one of the things the OED documents throughout the history of English so beautifully. cool
12-10-02, 04:39 PM kittypal I was reading the afterword in a book and the author mentioned he wrote "graphic novels" and then said "for those of you who don't know, it is done in comic book fashion". Not an hour later, flipping through the channels on t.v I heard a character say "dad can I get ___ whatever title he said" and the dad said "no comic books " the kid replied "it's a graphic novel" Now did I hear that term before and didn't pay attention or was it something more?????? wink 12-10-02, 09:29 PM sonnet26 Just sounds like a big ole coincidence to me...however, I'm jus' a dumb ole girl. LMAO
This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed, 05-02-07 11:11 PM
12-12-02, 03:40 PM babthrower Kittypal, I think it was an example of a phrase becoming current in the culture and then you hear it again simply because it is being used more.
"At this point in time" is one such. No human being had used it before - was it Haldiman? - used it. (Or wanted to.)
No "adipose singular lexical synchronicity " there. Lucky you!
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