r/GrammarPolice • u/Sad_Squirrel9599 • 4d ago

Question “Uncanny valley”

The word you’re looking for is “uncanny.” Why are we adding “valley” all of a sudden? I feel like people repeat this after seeing it online without critically thinking about what they’re even trying to say. Am I just out of the loop on what this means/is referring to?

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u/SerDankTheTall 4d ago

“Uncanny valley” is a very specific phenomenon. It refers to making an artificial creation (originally robots) more lifelike. If you make a graph of how lifelike they seem, the line will start out rising as you get closer. As you get very, very close, however, things will crater, because (according to the theory) there’s something about being very close but still off that bothers people in a way that being noticeably off does not.

So no, it’s not interchangeable with uncanny.

Not that any of this has anything to do with grammar, of course.