ABSTRACT
It took nearly a century to settle on a common term for the déjà vu experience, an understandable difficulty given the strange nature of the experience. The diametrical opposition of one’s objective (new) and subjective (old) evaluations of a personal experience has no cognitive parallel, and leaves an individual searching for a succinct label for this baffling experience. One of the primary reasons for the continued use of a French term introduced in the late 1800s is that there is no adequate English descriptor (Neppe, 1983e). A number of English terms have been put forth (see later), but they are generally cumbersome alternatives that tend to be more confusing than clarifying.
