Are you affraid of the dark?

I am not referring to the teenage series that was out in the nineties, but every time I use this question I would think of that show. It is amazing how words and phrases have been used with different book, film, and music titles and even ads campaigns and slogans . Each time they would act as tags to refer to the work they entitled. This very same mechanism of association has drifted my original intention for using this title. It lead me to thinking about how we assign feelings and associations to phrases and words.

The words have lost their originality and are quickly taken by popular culture to become catch phrases to play back different sequence of thoughts. Our nostalgic thoughts are no longer resurrected by certain places, smells or songs but also by the catch phrases or titles that are quickly exchanged with no borders or limits to their spread. If you say one phrase of a song, you might catch yourself singing the rest without you being even conscious of knowing the words.

Even single words like friends, lost, or letters like ER could lead to the retrieval of different mental notes. If the same title repeats then it might draw comparisons to both works and you often end up with either an inclination to the original work or the new one even though both works are not directly related. Your mind would automatically draw a relationship even be it a simple comparison.

Moreover, would there be a point when all phrases would be used and all titles reused that we would lose originality in this day and age when all is documented? We already have to compete for domain names and thank God for other extensions such as .net, .org and others that we can still use the name we first thought of without it being of limited associations. Is the next step is to invent new words or even a new language or is fusion words such as fashionista or the use of numbers in titles is providing us with more varieties and would be the way out to escape cliches and repeated titles.

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