Entry: phonemes (n.)
In context: "By repeating this term ['justifying your seed' - JM] over and over, perhaps in the same rhythm at which you squeeze a ball, you can reduce it to an empty series of phonemes, just formants and fricatives, trochaically stressed, signifying zip."
Definition: A unit of sound in a language that cannot be analysed into smaller linear units and that can distinguish one word from another (e.g. /p/ and /b/ in English pat, bat).
Also, very interestingly: Psychiatry. An hallucination in which voices are heard. rare.
Other: The phenomenon Wallace is talking about, reducing a word through repetition to meaninglessness, was one of my earliest interesting experiences with language.
SNOOT score: 1
Page:174
Source: Oxford English Dictionary
Definitive Jest is a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
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