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

[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.