Linguistic synaesthesia

[simont]

Today I wrote a random comment on somebody's LJ, and five minutes after I posted it I suddenly realised I'd inadvertently used the phrase ‘sounds good on paper’. Not sure how something does that. Does it rustle pleasantly, perhaps?

I suspect that mental crossover was simply due to my brain being momentarily indecisive between ‘sounds good’ and ‘looks good on paper’, and the fact that what I was thinking was an entirely abstract thought about the superficial plausibility of the comment I was responding to, to which either of the phrases I was considering would have been at best an approximation.

A more interesting case of linguistic synaesthesia showed up in a mathematical proof I jotted down in 2001 and recently found lying around on my computer, which described a nasty algebraic mess as ‘the following smelly-looking polynomial’. I suppose that in the age of the television, ‘smelly-looking’ would be a perfectly reasonable concept to apply to something seen on a screen, but I'm inclined to feel that when I used the phrase it was probably an unconscious reflection of my sensory deficiency: for practical purposes, when I hear the word ‘smelly’ I can generally take it to mean that the object thus described is something unpleasant which you don't want to go too near if you can help it. Thus, it didn't seem the least bit incongruous to describe a polynomial as looking as if it had that property; after all, how else could I judge something to be smelly?

Comments

[tackline.livejournal.com]

Metaphors are quite literally there to be mixed.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

No, it's perfectly reasonable for something to sound good on paper: reading is, for many people, an exercise of the auditory cortex with an internal voice pronouncing every word.

For some, it's a painful exercise of moving lips and half-suppressed mumbling speech.

Myself, I am a visual person and there is no 'sound' to a word on the page at all... Unless the passage I am reading is obviously intended to be spoken aloud, or is written in a 'spoken' style by some compelling orator. Try reading anything by Churchill (or Shakespeare, for that matter): it resounds from the page and finds the echoes in the room.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

You need a bevy of servants to read to you while you recline in a bath eating grapes and making important decisions.

Lifestyle choices

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced that I need them but I think it would be useful to try it out.

Did you have anyone in particular in mind?

[rmc28]

I do 'hear' books when I read them, but in my own voice. Unusually, when reading the first part of Gibbons Decline and Fall, I "heard" it read by Martin Sheen as President Bartlet. This may just say something about the overdose of West Wing DVDs that I'd been subjecting myself to at the time.

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

Hah, I read the comment to which you refer and it did trip my brain up briefly, although I realised what you meant.

As my Dad is fond of saying: "Don't look at me in that tone of voice, it doesn't smell a nice colour!"

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I agree with your analysis about your mixed metaphor, but point out "sound" does mean (according to the dictionary) to "present a particular impression: eg. That argument sounds reasonable." Your phrase just grabbed attention because (a) it makes sense but is taking the place of an established expression and (b) the juxtaposition of words having contradictory roots is jarring (like jumbo shrimp -- it's correct, but you might want to avoid it to make it easier to read).

[rathenar.livejournal.com]

I find it rather depressing that the word "smell", which is technically neutral in meaning, has negative connotations for so many people. I remember my mum seeing me with a bunch of flowers when I was a kid and asking me "are they smelly?" - what she meant, of course, was "do they have any perfume?" and I replied accordingly, but with hindsight, the question sounds wrong even though it shouldn't.

Not least because as a writer, it really annoys me when I want to describe something that has a pleasant or positive smell, especially when I'm trying for quite graceful prose, and can't think of a good word to use without sounding too poetical. What are good, positive synonyms for "to smell of", anyway? Help, anybody?

[simont]

Hmm. My mum always used to talk about buying "smelly stuff" for Grandma, meaning pleasantly perfumed products of one kind or another, and that didn't seem obviously negative to me. Mind you, I was nine; there might perfectly well have been a connotation that she didn't like the smells even if Grandma did...

Positive smell words: not quite a verb as you requested, but the one which springs immediately to mind is "redolent". "Fragrance" and "aroma"/"aromatic" might also come in handy.

[1ngi.livejournal.com]

We can be architects in our writing and create things with precision or we can be painters and splash words around randomly and see what valuable absurdities crop up. Poets are definitely painters with words.

I think it facinating that you aquire instinctive (and valid) attributes to words about smell. Any more examples - positive and negative?

[simont]

The only other one that springs to mind is the verb "smell" in the sense of "intuit, from very little visible evidence, the presence of". I use it in debugging when I'm starting to have a hunch about what sort of problem I'm facing. "I smell a memory corruption here."

I suppose that usage could be explained from the point of view of my unusual attitude to smell – when other people say they "smell" things I can't perceive the physical evidence on which they're basing the judgment, so I use the same word when the physical evidence on which I'm basing a judgment is meagre or non-obvious or both. But I don't think that can be the whole story, because the metaphor "to smell a rat" has much the same flavour and is used by normally osmic people.