I came across the following in a novel:

"What's the opposite of deja vu, when you see something that hasn't happened yet?"
"I don't know--avant verrais?"
"That's it."

does this have any basis in anything?

(besides, everyone knows that jamais vu is the opposite of deja vu! : )

does this have any basis in anything? - Who knows.. - but not in French.

jamais vu is the opposite of deja vu! - In this sense, I'd rather suggest "pas encore vu" (not yet seen).

when you see something that hasn't happened yet - if it happens really afterwards, I'd call it a premonition.

If deja vu is a feeling that you've already seen something that you've never seen before, then what would be the opposite? The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar. This might be interpreted as seeing something you don't expect or as not seeing something you do expect. How you'd say either of those in French is beyond me. Maybe to complete the oppositity you should say it in German.

The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.

Would this be avant verrais, deja vu or something else, I wonder:

I remember meeting an old guy, long and lean and hardy, up north in cottage country who had a "Tea Room" and an obsession with the symbol "0" [zero]. ["0" flew everwhere: on a flag atop his "Tea Room", on his outhouse wall, on the grocery basket strapped to the handlebars of his bicycle.] Esmond believed "0" is the key to the universe, explaining that in bookkeeping, the debits and the credits always cancel one another out to produce "0". [So it is with the universe, he averred.]

Any way, this old guy, who's name was Esmond - [who sold his own truly ungainly oil paintings to Tea Room customers who bought them because Esmond was a true original, not an artist - I used to call Esmond "Esmondo" and actually bought one of his paintings on condition that he sign it "Esmondo", which he did] - returning to my storyline - Esmond told me once, as I drank his tea and listened to his piano playing and ate his butter tarts baked over his wood burning stove, he told me that he had hitchhiked up to this country many years ago, and when he stood on a rock outcropping looking over the land, he realized that this was his home. For him it was meant to be. It was all laid out for him in the cosmic scheme of things.

In short, "Esmond's Tea Room" was avant verrais. Or was it deja vu? Or was it simply Esmondo-as-he-was-meant-to-be [Esmond-before-the-incarnation-of-Esmondo]?

People used to arrive from all over to visit Esmond to soak up his wisdom [his joie de verrais?]. He didn't believe in sickness, it was all psychosomatic, he said. [In the summer, he bathed in the lake, a short distance away. In the winter, he bathed in a snow bank.] When people asked Esmond for his keys to the Cosmos and an eternity of bliss on another plane of existence released from repeated resurrections in an earthly shell, he always told them this:

"When you come here, you can drink from my well. But, when you go away, you must dig your own well."

I still think $35 wasn't too much to pay for my original "Esmondo".

I came across the following in a novel What novel, please, if you don't mind?

what would be the opposite? The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar. Faldage, I'm glad I went off to reply to a PM between reading this for the first time and now. I had "marked" it mentally to come back and disagree with, but upon second (and more careful) reading, I do agree. I believe you are saying that when someone sees something/someone they used to know, now they don't. And I would call that amnesia. [only half joking e]

The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.

jamais vu[Fr. “never seen”] the sensation that familiar surroundings are strangely unfamiliar; the illusion that one has never seen anything like that before.
- Dorland's medical dictionary & Chopped liver review

On a humorous note: in one of his comedy routines, I once heard Robin Williams say that he was experiencing vu jade: the strange feeling that none of this has ever happened before.

the strange feeling that none of this has ever happened before

And then there is vu incroyable - the feeling that this can't be happening at all.

re: The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.

jamais vu[Fr. “never seen”] the sensation that familiar surroundings are strangely unfamiliar; the illusion that one has never seen anything like that before.
- Dorland's medical dictionary & Chopped liver review


i remember this sensation when i was a child, if we went away for a few days, or a week (to camp) when i came home, everything looked new to me, it was as if i had never seen my parents apartment or the furnature before..

i hadn't forgotten the apartment or the furnature, its just it was a surprize to see it.. i would notice the grain of the wood, or details of upholstry pattern, or just the way the sun light pattern the shadows..

this persisted till i was in my 20's or so.. its been years now since i have experienced the sensation.

maybe sharing more than i should about my psycological state than i should)

when i was a child, if we went away for a few days, or a week (to camp) when i came home, everything looked new to me

Reminds me of T.S. Eliot's famous words, of Troy:

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and see the place for the first time."

BTW I am certainly not fluent in French, but it looks to me like the phrase "avant verrais" translates into "before the truth", at least roughly. So it suggests to me that "avant verrais" is a glimpse of something before it happens, or precognition, or "premonition" as wseisber has already mentioned.

"deja vu", on the other hand, is the sense that you 'have already been there', as tho in another dimension, or a parallel dimension, of time and space, or in a past life. One does not have to believe in such things to experience the sensation, altho it might give one reason to be curious about the possibility.

Now that I think of it, Esmond's sense of "home" was clearly avant verrais. At least, it was clear for him.

About three years ago during the first incarnation of AWAD we had this discussion self-same, remember?
Oh well, fogetfullness is oft times a blessing because now you old folks get to hear my story again...

Twenty years ago I had a drinking buddy named Richard Morgan, He was affable, intellegent, tender-hearted, and Manic Depressive by clinical certfication. One night as we sat drinking whiskey in a car in the woods he had an attack and described it thusly..."All of sudden everything appears strange and foreign without a single reference point to facilitate comprehension. It is like being dead - no! - it is worse than being dead - every atom of your being yearns for a void.
I really shouldn't be taking my medication and drinking this whiskey, my psychiatrist said that combining the two would make me more psychotic."

"Damn Richard, that's terrible" I said, "Can't those incompetent quacks do something other than keep you doped up and sober?"

"No." He said. "They know almost nothing about the disorder but like good shamans they have given the condition a name.
They call it deja va the direct opposite of deja ju."

Two years later Richard died. He was hospitalised for a minor heart attack and simply lost his will to live. He was thirty-five.

Some twenty years later the jolly folks of Awad were batting about words and began a discussion (deja vu all over again ) about the apporiate word for the opposite of deja vu. So I told them the Richard Morgan story ( deja vu all over again ) and told them (You all) that the correct term was deje va. Oh no! said the not-so-merry band of word pundits, the term has no such inverse meaning when retranslated from the French.

They were right. I looked it up. But damnit Richard had said it and I had heard it so the rest of the world can go to hell.

Then three years later (deje vu all over again ) when tsuwm posted the below above...

jarmis vu Fr. never seen.

...I was vindicated. Although I know that you are never so wrong than when you are dead sure you are right - this time I was dead sure I was right and I was. You see Richard had not va-ed the vu. Richard had jarmis-ed when in my drunken state I thought he had deje-ed and I had later disremembered it.

And I'll tell you one thing - it feels good to be proven right.

If deja vu is a feeling that you've already seen something that you've never seen before, then what would be the opposite? The normal answer seems to be the feeling that something you should be familiar with is totally unfamiliar.

Normal, schmormal! Surely the opposite should be: a lack of feeling that you haven’t already seen something that you have seen before…

Ah, hope that helps to clarify this important quirk of the human condition, my fine Fong. Or should it be "haven't already seen nothing..."? Think I’ll go and lie down now.

Mav!! Welcome home!!

Yeah, it's always hard to say what is meant be the opposite of something like this, but your proposal sounds like the zero-grade version. Whatever the term is I feel it every spring when I am going to a minor league baseball game along a route that I haven't been on since last summer.

I really shouldn't be taking my medication and drinking this whiskey, my psychiatrist said

Have you ever been somewhere brand new
Where you experienced a sense deja vu
You ordered a beer
And instead got a sneer
And a bar tab thrust upon you.

Have you ever been avant verrai
Where you ended in complete disarray
At home in your bed
With searing pain in your head
And you didn't know that you'd been away.

I agree with Mav. Jamais vu is not exactly an opposite - it is more like a corollary of Deja vu. Both are classified under paramnesias

Mav!??! I'd heard rumours of your existence, but figured you were some sort of cyber-gryphon, invented to scare delinquent netizenettes. Great to see ya, and a wonderfully apt thread for you to surface in, na?

a wonderfully apt thread for you to surface in, na?

Aye, if he be a drinkin' man himself [returned from an avant verrais?]

We are always appreciated more in our absence, Mav.

Trust me, I know.

One thing I've noticed in your absence, Mav. The only sure way to get noticed around here is to be insulting. Or to tell the truth. Some confuse the one with the other.

I say, if anyone takes insult from the truth, they are taking succour from deceit. [Oft-times, self-deceit.]

Those who seek a broader, deeper, more truthful "understanding of reality" -- the guiding impulse of all intelligence if, as themilum would say, intelligence has any true meaning or purpose -- cannot give comfort to those are discomforted by that impulse, without becoming worse than they are: a hypocrite.

All knowledge, including self-knowledge, can never move in any direction, with integrity, except forward. It can stand still, but it can never go back.

Those who argue "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise", have an incontrovertible argument. But if they seek the shelter of ignorance, they must shelter themselves alone.

Even AWADtalk is no safe harbor from reality.

Tsuwm, I’ve never heard of "avant verrais."

It’s a rather confusion structure of words.

Avant means previous or before.
Verrais is in the “Conditionnel present” form – which means it says “I would see if…”

Are you sure there was an “s” at the end of verrais? If it was simply avant verrai, though ungainly, it would mean "before seeing."

Mav - allo. Happy birthday!!

Verrais is in the “Conditionnel present” form – which means it says “I would see if…”

Aha, someone who can read French more competently than perhaps 99% of the people who have read the novel from which Tsuwm was quoting. [And, incidentally, I would be amongst them if I had read the novel.]

You seem to have pierced the veil here, belMarduk.

In the novel, someone asks some else to come up with the opposite of "deja vu". That person's answer is a guess, "I don't know -- avant verrais", a guess by someone quite possibly as incompetent in French as someone like myself.

The author can be excused for the flawed French because it's just a novel and the truth the author is representing is the truth of the character who answers the question, not the truth of the answer itself.

Perhaps "avant verrais" is a more 'truthful' answer in this sense, coming from someone who is guessing with only a rudimentary knowledge of French, than a properly translated stab at the opposite of "deja vu".

Now, here's the best part:

The person who asked the question says "That's it" to "avant verrais". That is exactly what that person would say even if they were fluent in French because, in French, "avant verrais" sounds exactly the same as "avant verrai".

In the result, the author has been true to both characters.
And BelMaruk has come up with the correct French and the correct explanation. Congratulations, BelMarduk.

It seems all our speculations about "avant verrais" were much adieu about nothing.

a wonderfully apt thread for you to surface in, na?


It kind of appealed to me, not least because I can only half-remember the last time this general area of discussion cropped up - happy as a goldfish, me!

Great to see my bro is still alive and kickin' :)

And speaking of appeals, thanks, ma belle bel, let me clap your kind thought with a ringing greeting from the stygian gloom that is Wales at this time of year.

the stygian gloom

There's only one way to exorcize "a stygian gloom", Maverick.

"Once moor" will rid any man of the moors.

> only one way to exorcize

I gave up exercise for lent - I lent the bicycle to a priest ;)

I lent the bicycle to a priest

Priests have been known to fortify themselves against "stygian gloom", as well, Maverick.

Aye, but it's easier to keep a steady course on a bar stool than it is on a bicycle, you say.

"Once moor" to that.

> steady course

Sheesh, you shoulda seen the barstools on Friday night - they were pitching and tumbling on a wild and frothing main!

Now I am landed once more, And o’er a milder Zone my pinions spread...