What Is a Word Salad in Speech or Writing?

The metaphorical expression word salad (or word-salad) refers to the practice of stringing together words that have no apparent connection to one another—an extreme case of jumbled speech or disorderly writing. Also called (in psychology) paraphrasia.

Psychiatric clinicians use the term word salad to refer to a rare form of disorganized speech:

• Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary
  ...a group of neologisms," according to Robert Jean Campbell. "They are meaningless until the patient discusses the neologisms at length, thus revealing their underlying significance. It is a coded language, not unlike dreams in principle; the patient holds the table to the code and only he can provide meanings to the otherwise incomprehensible dialect.

Examples and Observations

• Manfred Spitzer
  [Psychiatrist Eugen] Bleuler described the relatively high frequency of indirect, oblique, or remote, associations in schizophrenic patients. This type of association, observed either in spontaneous speech or in the word-association test, goes from one word to another word via a not overtly spoken intermediate word. One of Bleuler's examples is wood-dead cousin. At first glance, this association appears to be a complete word salad. However, if you know that a cousin of the patient had died recently and was buried in a wooden coffin, it becomes obvious that this was, in fact, an indirect association, from wood to wooden coffin to dead cousin.
• D. Frank Benson and Alfredo Ardila
  Neologistic and semantic jargon are the primary components of a schizophrenic language output that has been termed word salad, an apt phrase for the mixture of misused linguistic features produced by the schizophrenic subject. Much more often, however, word salad is based on brain damage (Benson, 1979a).
• Noam Chomsky
  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• Susan Neville
  When there are recognizable words but no one else can make sense of them, they call it 'word salad.' No one ever thinks to call it music.
• Gregory Corso
  How nice it'd be to come home to her
  and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
  aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
  and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
  and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
  saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
  God what a husband I'd make!

Word Salads and Creative Writing

• Heather Sellers
  The next key characteristic of schizophrenia was the tendency toward 'word salad.' There was an example, a rambling block quotation that strung together a grandmother's death, sunlight, dinner, and cats that didn't exist, interspersed with inappropriate laughter. Again not my mother. Again more like me. 'Word salad' was the exact name of a writing exercise I gave my students at the beginning of the year. In a piece of writing, those moves from death to dinner could be crucial, heartbreaking.
  I opened a fat gray volume titled Schizophrenia. I found a chart that listed the warning signs of the disease: birth complications, separation from parents, withdrawn behavior, emotional unpredictability, poor peer relations, solo play. One could also consider this the recipe for becoming an artist, a writer.
  

Word-Salad Poetry

• Nancy Bogen
  [Y]ou mustn't become so enamored of the sounds you're using as to lose sight of your meaning. To do so would be tantamount to creating word-salad, and even as a form of rebellion, that won't do, it simply won't. Why? Because it's been done too many times already and by now it's just plain boring, as boring as saying the same word or phrase over and over like a mantra. If people found it on a printed page, they'd simply shrug and move on; if they heard you reading it aloud, they'd just tune out. So what, some of you are saying? So plenty; you're supposed to be communicating—poetry is a special form of communication between yourself, the poet, and others who want to or may be persuaded to hear what you have to say in your language.

Word-Salad Spam

• Pui-Wing Tam
  Word-salad spam has become especially problematic in the last year, say antispam software companies. The technique of stringing together gibberish phrases was devised specifically to dodge a sophisticated type of screening technology, known as a Bayesian filter, which gained popularity in 2003.