Why Do We Dislike Short-Range Repetition?
Friday, March 5th, 2010Here’s something I wrote a few days ago:
In graduate school, I studied experimental psychology. I wanted to learn how to do experiments. The best way to learn is to do, I thought, so I started doing self-experiments in addition to my regular research (with rats). One thing I studied was my acne. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline and benzoyl peroxide. In a few months, my self-experiments showed that tetracycline didn’t work and benzoyl peroxide did work — the opposite of what I originally believed.
Emphasis added. I wanted to write “the opposite of what I originally thought” but the earlier use of thought made me use believed instead. Avoidance of this sort of repetition is standard practice. It’s even important scientifically. The linguist David Stuart made a big advance in understanding ancient Mayan when he realized that different symbols mean the same thing. The different symbols appeared in the same block of text, like my thought and believed.
My question is: Why? What’s the evolutionary reason? Maybe it’s part of a push toward novelty, so that nobody says, “Today I went to the store. Today I went to the store.” Or maybe it’s a way of pushing us to make distinctions, invent new words, and learn new words. It pushes us to make distinctions because it pushed me away from lazily writing ” . . . thought . . . thought”.
One reason this interests me is my interpretation of why we like repeated decorative elements. Many sorts of decoration involved repeated elements — identical things or pictures placed side by side. I believe we like this sort of thing so that we will place similar things side by side. When we place them side by side it’s easy to notice small differences that would otherwise be hard to see. Noticing small differences makes us connoisseurs. Connoisseurs are important economically because they are willing to pay more for finely-made stuff. They support cutting-edge artisans.
The invent-new-words explanation strikes me as the most plausible. First we do what the Mayans did: invent new words that mean exactly the same thing as the old words, purely to avoid short-range repetition. As the words get older, their meanings drift independently and they start to mean slightly different things (such as job and profession). Thereby the language does a better job of keeping up with technical/economic progress, which keeps generating new things that need new names.







