What is the term for that strange feeling you get when an utterly familiar word becomes unrecognizable?  I just experienced it while posting a comment about the word "spirit."  I looked at it, and it had lost its word-ness, and was now a random string of letters.  
It's similar to the Capgras delusion, one of the strangest of a strange family of mental disorders, but without the attendant paranoia, perhaps because it is so fleeting.
Is there a word or phrase for it, though?  A "vocab delusion?"  "Lexical misidentification syndrome?"
3 comments:
Sounds like an aphasiac moment. That happens to me too. And if I think too much about typing as I type, I can't type. That really freaks me out.
There's an interesting little tidbit about that sort of "procedural memory loss" here.
It's totally weird when that happens. I s'pose the proper term is 'uncanny.'
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