An experience difficult to describe

[vvvexation]

I just asked my dad the following question over email:

Is there a name for the phenomenon whereby a pale imitation of some
experience is better known than the experience itself, and becomes
almost more of a prototype than the prototype is? But without people
forgetting that it is just an imitation, so that when they for once in
their lives have the prototypical experience, they think "wow, this
feels like [prototype X]" just as they always do when they're having
the derivative experience, and forget for a moment that this time it
actually is the prototype they're experiencing?

He evidently isn't quite sure what I mean and wants a specific example. However, I'm not sure I want to share with him the example I was thinking of.

Anybody have any parent-safe examples of this kind of thing?

Comments

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I think I read this in a Calvin Trillin book. The narrator was the sports-page editor of a newspaper somewhere -- I want to say it was the Chicago Tribune, but I'm not at all confident of that. They had a guy who'd been reporting baseball games for over fifty years, and his articles were dripping with baseball-game-reporting cliches. The narrator asked him to stop using so many cliches. The reporter said, son, they are my cliches.

Not quite the same thing, but pretty close...?

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Fairly close. Actually, rereading my dad's email, I now think he may have understood after all and just wanted to double-check.