Language game shows disjoint language into mere lexical skeleton detached from meaning.

Evidence

The pronouncement of decrees in any case (issuing edicts that constrict the future of the language) does not set you free from collective anxieties. Game shows on television, organized in every country equipped to do so, spotlight the destabilization of languages in a spectacular manner. These games are the same everywhere. One must reconstitute words whose letters are either hidden or given in no order. Meaning has little importance, and there have been cases in which contestants have appeared on the shows after having learned whole sections of dictionary. So one disjoints a language, taking into account, in short, only its skeleton (if one can speak of the lexicon as a mere skeleton) to which one clings. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 522

Categorization

• CANDY: The detail that contestants memorize whole dictionary sections for word games is a light, shareable curiosity.
• XREF: connects to: Descriptive grammarians distort living language by dissecting it into artificial parts. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 443; Classical translations routinely distort meaning through culturally specific terms — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1600; Philology’s abstraction turned language into a sightless realm ruled by race and nation — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 379

Broader Connections

• Philology’s abstraction turned language into a sightless realm ruled by race and nation #corroborates (0.80) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 379
• Descriptive grammarians distort living language by dissecting it into artificial parts. #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 443
• Classical translations routinely distort meaning through culturally specific terms #exemplifies (0.72) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1600