word association

Sometimes I find that words develop such strong associations in my mind that it becomes difficult to use them, or even encounter them.

I’m thinking specifically of the word “sporadically.”

And I know that my sister, right now, if she’s reading this is giggling. And the line from the movie Clueless—”I hope not sporadically”—is drifting through her head. She might have actually said it out loud upon coming across it here. And whenever I encounter that word in the wild, so to speak, my brain will take it in a straight line back to Brittany Murphy’s line in that movie.

So this morning, on my commute, I was reading a New York Times article on transracial adoption on my iPhone, and I read: “Yet the impact of such adoptions on identity has been only sporadically studied.” And I kind of giggled.

Maybe it was the stiltedness of the sentence (is it possible to use “sporadically” without sounding awkwardly pretentious?). Maybe it was the fact that the sentence was not necessary in the article, and it read like the author had lost a bet or was dared to include it. Maybe the qualitative adverbial structure reinforced the Clueless-connection for me, but I giggled. I know there are probably other words than this one that I consider, logically or unconsciously, “off limits” in my own writing because of specific contexts, that are probably as equally personally specific to me, but I can’t think of any other at the moment.

Do you have any words that remind you so strongly of a particular context that you just simply can’t bring yourself to use them seriously? Or ever?