Saturday, September 8, 2007

Ambiguity

You may have noticed when I was talking about embedded commands that I used the word "buy" in place of the word "by." This is called a phonological ambiguity. It can be two words that sound alike, such as hair and hare. It can also be two words that sound like one word, such as in trance and entrance. You see the unconscious has to take the word and reference back to all the meanings it has. In random conversations this means very little, but when you're embedding commands and stack phrases which are on a certain subject the unconscious will figure out what you really mean.

Remember that the words don't have to sound exactly alike. If you were to substitute the word hue for the word you in the stream of conversation 99.9% of people would never notice the difference.

Exercise 1 - Sit and write down at least 100 phonological ambiguities.

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