Double the Vus

"It's like déjà vu all over again."
- Yogi Berra

A modest proposal to augment the English language with three new French phrases.

There are three mental phenomena sometimes referred to as "the Vus". Here they are.

• Déjà vu ("already seen") - The sensation that a new situation has been experienced before. Also called paramnesia or promnesia. There are several theories that attempt to explain the basis of this phenomenon. One is that it occurs when events are routed to long-term memory (where our sense of the past resides) before being completely processed by our short-term memories (where we sense the present).
• Jamais vu ("never seen") - The sensation that a familiar situation is being experienced for the first time. In a sense this is the opposite of déjà vu.
• Presque vu ("almost seen") - The sensation that a word (or fact) is on the verge of being recalled, but cannot be recalled. Also called the "tip of the tongue" (TOT) phenomenon. When this appears in a medical context, it could be associated with various types of aphasia.
  

Are three Vus enough? Au contraire! With the human mind being susceptible to many varieties of memory and cognition disorders, we're only scratching the surface of possible Vus. I propose to double the number of Vus by adding three new ones. I'm not convinced these will swoop overnight into the conversations of English speakers, but am tossing them into the ring anyhow.

• Remort vu ("dead again seen") - The discovery that someone died who you would have guessed was already dead. This happened to me recently with the 2009 death of famous painter Andrew Wyeth. He was born during World War I, and became a renowned painter before World War II, so the actuarial tables would have put long odds on his reaching 2009.
• L'oignon vu ("The Onion seen") - The sensation while reading a real news story that you're reading an article from The Onion. For example (also see [1]), in 2007, after U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney took a stance that the office of the Vice President is not an "entity within the executive branch", and was therefore exempt from the protocols safeguarding security information within the executive branch. When contacted by the Information Security Oversight Office about his stance, he recommended that their office be abolished.
• Désir vu ("desire seen") - The case of someone's belief system being influenced by what they want to believe is true. For example, someone might be certain that their lottery ticket will be a winner despite the lack of evidence supporting this belief. Related to désir vu is the proverb that it's hard to get someone to understand something if their paycheck depends upon their being ignorant of it.
  

Voilà! Three new Vus. Please use them to add some savoir-faire to your repertoire. If they become popular, I just might create some more.

[1] A blog entry pointing out the Onion-ness of this news was posted on June 21, 2007, and accessed by me on February 3, 2009. It can be found at http://oaklanddilettante.blogspot.com/2007/06/i-cant-believe-its-not-onion.html.