Not Pictured

Okay, this idea surfaced in my mind whilst driving around the country, trying as I was to think of an idea for a blog entry that did not involve photos or excessive work actually having an opinion on a topic. And it occurred to me that there are now quite a lot of words which I cannot see/hear/read/think/smell etc without my mind instantly and unavoidably making connections which are usually neither relevant nor desirable. Some have been used in popular fiction, others have become hard-wired in my brain as parts of in-jokes or memories. I started trying to list these words in my head, and came up with quite a number.

Obviously, first and foremost, are those words which have been used as proper names in some way or other:

Fitz, serenity, skit, angel, bob, firefly, myopia, doctor.

But that's not so dissimilar to the way names mean different things in different contexts anyway. However, there are then those other words...words which, through no fault of their own, have been used so recurrently, prominently or perfectly in some place or other that they stop having any other meaning of their own for me:

content
champion
jackass
flagstone

Those were ones that sprung to mind - perfectly normal, everyday words from different walks of life which, whenever I come across them, zap me somewhere else entirely. I'm sure there are more which are not jumping to the forefront of my brain at the moment, but the point of my post wasn't really to enumerate them all (although tell me yours, please) - just to wonder at the phenomenon of pathways in the brain and words that stop being words.