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My sister just emailed me to let me know that we both have a form of synesthesia called ordinal linguistic personification. This is where you associate personalities with numbers, letters, months, or days. I'm kind of pleased to discover there is a name for this that does not include the adjectives "cutesy" or "insane".
I personify days and months. Like, October is a really cool guy who's game for anything, and April is daring and rebellious, and really wants September to like her. Wednesday is diffident, and Saturday is loud.
Anyone else do this? I'd be interested to know what kind of personalities other people ascribe to letters and days and months.
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Fyfe, ever read Neil Gaiman's short story "October in the Chair"? I suspect you might enjoy it. It's collected in Fragile Things.
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I occasionally experience ordinal linguistic personification. I first realized this when I was a kid and, when reading the stick shift in my father's car, I clearly identified colors with the gear numbers. Two was green and three was white, I recall.
Even less occasionally, I get taste synesthesia and can smell or even taste colors.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: I occasionally experience ordinal linguistic personification. I first realized this when I was a kid and, when reading the stick shift in my father's car, I clearly identified colors with the gear numbers. Two was green and three was white, I recall.
I don't do OLP but I have some other synesthesia-like experiences, though not very strong or frequent. My almost-step-mom does the Grapheme-color synesthesia I just linked to. But I think ordinal linguistic personification is extremely cool. This is the first I've heard of it but it's rather awesome. Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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That sounds awesome. My first question would be, does everyone with OLP think the same days/numbers/months have the same personality traits? Or is it like totally different for each person? Like, maybe they DO have personalities, and most of us just can't see that. Maybe we're just blind to that aspect of things. What do you think? Do you and your sister agree on the personalities of various months and days of the week?
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Tatiana, from what I've read of synaesthesia there is not a consensus among synaesthetes about what color is "right" for a number or personality is "right" for a month. The important quality is the persistent and reproducible personal association between something and its strange sensory counterpart.
The test for whether someone is really a synaesthete is they are given a slew of things and are told to write down what association they feel with it. (numbers as colors etc) Then they are retested at a later date. True synaesthetes do fantastically better at reproducing the same responses for the same numbers because they don't have to remember then like a non-synaesthete posing as one would have to do.
SamPrimary, if you do taste synaesthesia on any sort of consistent basis people researching synaesthesia would be interested. I believe gustatory(taste) syn.. is really rare.
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Ah, I'm disappointed. It's still cool, though. I can picture different people with OLP having arguments about the personality of Thursday. That would be fun!
I think Thursday needs to go on a diet.
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I was reading something about a guy with taste synesthesia. He said the United States tasted like Starburst.
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I association colors with days of the week and numbers. I remember picturing these colors quite vividly in my head when I was a kid. This almost completely went away as I grew older, especially when I consciously became aware of what I was doing. Learning about synesthesia almost made it go away.
Monday -- dark blue Tuesday -- red Wednesday -- light blue Thursday -- ? Friday -- brown Saturday -- ? Sunday -- ?
one -- blue two -- red three -- yellow four -- ? five -- red six -- ? seven -- blue eight -- yellow nine -- green ten -- ?
Posts: 930 | Registered: Dec 2006
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Hmm... I sometimes associate music with colors, but that's mostly because I always have a visual supplement when I'm listening to music.
Posts: 1029 | Registered: Apr 2007
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I wonder if companies that make colorful toy letters and numbers for children employ people with that sort of synesthesia, and if it intereferes with their work.
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