Word salad

For the album by Fischer-Z, see Word Salad (album).

Word salad is a mixture of random words that, while arranged in phrases that appear to give them meaning, actually carry no significance. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but the meaning is hopelessly confused. A famous example is Noam Chomsky's phrase, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." The term is used to describe poetry and other literary works (as in Chomsky's example), but is also often used to describe a symptom of mental disorders or textual randomization in computer programs.

In mental health diagnoses

Word salad may describe a symptom of mental conditions in which a person attempts to communicate an idea, but random words come out instead. Often, the person is unaware that he or she did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia, as well as after anoxic brain injury.

It may be present as:

• Wernicke's aphasia
• Schizophasia, a mental condition characterized by incoherent babbling (compulsive or intentional, but nonsensical)
• Logorrhea, a mental condition characterized by excessive talking (incoherent and compulsive)
• Clanging, a speech pattern that follows rhyming and other sound associations rather than meaning.

In computing

Word salad can be generated by a computer program for entertainment purposes (for example, a game similar to Mad Libs). Mojibake, also called Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") in German, is an effect similar to word salad, in which an assortment of random text is generated through character encoding incompatibility. This artefact has been the subject of amusement as well, when people tried to "translate" the generated characters into intelligible words and sentences.^{[citation needed]}

Nonsensical phrasing can also be generated for more malicious reasons, such as the Bayesian poisoning used to counter Bayesian spam filters by randomizing text in a syntax that seems to make nominal sense. Bayesian poisoning may also use intelligible sentences, such as text taken from an old novel, which have no connection to the main subject of the spam. On internet message forums (ie usenet) the term sporge has been used to describe machine-generated sentences and paragraphs that are essentially identical to word salad.