I agree on both counts. Repetition is valuable (and I will say even necessary) and it is overused. Maybe overused, or maybe it's that it was used to the exclusion of everything else. I wonder if it is because people didn't really give a lot of thought to how to teach.
I think the experiment is important -- the playing with ideas, which can happen mentally or physically. It's not just that repetition is important as in how one might practice the times tables. It's also necessary to have variation in the repetition - at least for some skills. I look at these like trials in an experiment. A baseball player may not learn something every single time he hits the ball, but over time he might recognize a few things, like where the ball lands when he hits a certain way. A chess player might realize that a certain line of play leads to a less constrained situation for him. A speaker (or writer) may realize that some phraseology is evocative.
And others repeat the idea or the phrase, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Pretty soon uncommon words and phrases and neologisms become commonplace and then everyone's using infrastructure and baud rate and everything-gate and gradually the novel twist of phrase becomes hackney.
I say this as if it were purely calculated, because it often is, but I reckon the process is commonly unconscious. The tune we have blissfully enjoyed for so long grows tedious. The evocative phrase fails to evoke.
For some people. Maybe for all people at some times.
Example: children can listen to the same damned story night after night for weeks, or even months. (I confess I have never wearied of "The Butter Battle Book.")
There's considerable comfort in saying what everyone else is saying, or what has always been said. But for some people that's not sufficient. So they write poems or they make puns or they read eclectically or they solve crosswords and suddenly their agents are hypothesizing new associations and assimilating new patterns. I wonder sometimes if they might be forming new agents in their brains.
k
