ostranenie means defamiliarisation. It carries an Arena rating of 1511, earned across 120 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, ostranenie ranks #1,898 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #2,565 of 17,124 for Most Sublime Words, #3,554 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #5,568 of 17,104 for Most Storied Words.
Why “ostranenie” is a great word
OSTRANENIE — [Noun] A literary and artistic technique of presenting common things in an unfamiliar way to disrupt habitual perception and renew sensory experience. From Russian остранение (ostranenije), from the root stran- ("strange, foreign") with a prefix and suffix implying the process of making strange; coined in 1917 by the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky. Unlike "Verfremdungseffekt" (which specifically denotes Bertolt Brecht's theatrical alienation effect to foster critical distance) or "foregrounding" (which is a general stylistic term for textual prominence), ostranenie is the primal act of wrenching perception from the anesthetic of habit. It is Tolstoy describing a horse's gait as the movement of a wooden rocking machine, the routine of a dinner made to seem a bizarre ritual, or the sight of your own street rendered momentarily illegible—a small, artistic crack in the glaze of habit through which the world's strangeness bleeds.
Etymology
Russian остранение (ostranenije)
noun
- Defamiliarisation.e.g.“For quotations using this term, see Citations:ostranenie.”
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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