Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Referring to oneself or itself.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective That or who refers to itself or oneself; used as a stylistic device when done in literary works.
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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As a result, our media have increasingly degenerated into self-referential ideological boutiques, with Fox News being the one most likely to annoy Hartmann's fans.
Ian Fletcher: Review: Thom Hartmann's Rebooting the American Dream Ian Fletcher 2011
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As a result, our media have increasingly degenerated into self-referential ideological boutiques, with Fox News being the one most likely to annoy Hartmann's fans.
Ian Fletcher: Review: Thom Hartmann's Rebooting the American Dream Ian Fletcher 2011
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Thus do liberals or progressives or whatever we're supposed to be calling ourselves live up to our reputation for using lofty, smug, self-referential and exclusionist language rather than speaking in real, concrete terms.
We Need People Who Ride Bikes, Not Cyclists « PubliCola 2010
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By the end of my visit I would have been happy to see photographs of kittens or even some grandiloquent paintings by Julian Schnabel, anything not so proud of being self-referential and small time.
Snapshot of a Movement Richard B. Woodward 2012
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These sentences are of the self-referential form, s = 'I am not provable from A', where A is a subset of sentences in the theory.
Theories of Everything and Godel's theorem Gordon McCabe 2009
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What Vampire adds is a kind of knowing, self-referential jokiness that lightens the tension without dissipating it.
'Vampire Diaries' stakes its claim in a populated genre 2009
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When you are a business owner and in a position of authority, it is human to make assumptions and allow self-referential thinking to dominate.
Social Business, the Golden Rule, and Open Empathy Organization 2010
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To me, this indicates that he not only believes himself divorced from those social categories, but then projects his own self-referential experience onto others and believes them to be similarly divorced from their social categories.
you see barriers, i see invitations. « Love | Peace | Ohana 2010
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The artist aims to present her dream-like reality with formal considerations, and her self-referential (and self-realizational) execution often has unforeseen results: "A lot of times, I'm really surprised at what comes out was completely unexpected," she says.
Tanja M. Laden: Marnie Weber's "Eternity Forever" Tanja M. Laden 2010
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In some mitigation, for the application of mathematics to the physical world one's conscience may be fairly untroubled by the difficulties of self-referential statements.
Theories of Everything and Godel's theorem Gordon McCabe 2009
pterodactyl commented on the word self-referential
Does this word really refer to itself?
March 25, 2008
Jubjub commented on the word self-referential
See self-referential.
November 17, 2009