Thursday word: confabulation
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1word1dayconfabulation (kuhn-fab-yuh-LAY-shuhn) - n., a casual conversation, chat; (Psych.) a fabricated memory believed to be true.
The first is the original meaning, in use since the 1490s -- adopted from Late Latin confabulātiōn, conversation/talk together, from com-, with/together + fabulari, to chat. The psychiatric term seems to be an independent coinage from fabulari's deeper root, fabula, meaning a fable/tale, ultimately with a sense of something said/told. Typically this latter type of confabulations are filling gaps in memories, to smooth things over, though experiments show that people regularly do some amount of this, with small details about events, which is why eye-witness testimony is, notoriously, so unreliable -- it's not just what we miss, but what we fill in.
We had a brief confabulation about her ex, not all of which I believed.
---L.
The first is the original meaning, in use since the 1490s -- adopted from Late Latin confabulātiōn, conversation/talk together, from com-, with/together + fabulari, to chat. The psychiatric term seems to be an independent coinage from fabulari's deeper root, fabula, meaning a fable/tale, ultimately with a sense of something said/told. Typically this latter type of confabulations are filling gaps in memories, to smooth things over, though experiments show that people regularly do some amount of this, with small details about events, which is why eye-witness testimony is, notoriously, so unreliable -- it's not just what we miss, but what we fill in.
We had a brief confabulation about her ex, not all of which I believed.
---L.
