site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2776 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I have synesthesia, specifically grapheme-color synesthesia. I didn't know this until I was a second year in med school. My behavioral science (think psychiatry) professor was teaching us normal, non-pathological variants of human behavior because it's important to know what is "weird but normal". Like he related a story from a colleague of his who had seen a 14 year old girl for "hearing voices", and after questioning it turned out to be her internal monologue, that sort of thing. When he described synesthesia I said, loud enough for him to hear, "what the fuck?" which stopped the class. He asked me if there was a problem and I said well no but I guess I have synesthesia and hadn't realized. He asked me to talk to him after class so he could pick my brain a bit but unfortunately I'm not very interesting because I don't hear colors or taste people. I've had this condition for a while. My phone number has a lot of 3s in it because when I was 16 and had to choose a phone number at the Cingular store the phone guy gave me three possible numbers and I chose the one with the 3s because 3s are green and that's my favorite color. Had no idea what I was doing at the time.

Interestingly this isn't the first time I've come into contact with the subject. A friend of my wife's from college tasted people. For instance when she thought about or interacted with my wife she vaguely tasted spaghetti and meat sauce. I was a strawberry Flintstones push-pop. Another friend of ours was Domino's pepperoni pizza. Come to think of it all of the foods were childhood foods; nobody was flank steak dressed with ancho-peanut coulis.

There aren't a ton of practical benefits for this condition, but they do exist:

  1. I can more easily remember long strings of numbers. When I was in 3rd grade and we were learning our times tables, my teacher handed out our tables and told us to memorize them. They were a jumbled vertical list so like...

"2x4=8"

"5x2=10"

"2x9=18"

...and so on in every combination up through 12 plus the reverse so a list was 24 entries long. This list she gave us was also the test, but with the answers filled in. So the test was like...

"2x4=_"

"5x2=_"

"2x9=_"

...and so on. She told us to "memorize it", and thought we would memorize it across. Little me didn't know that so I memorized the 32 digits vertically, and easily. I didn't figure out I was doing it wrong until she asked me to go to the blackboard to answer a multiplication question I should have known, like "3x8=_", but I couldn't do it which confused her because I had thus far gotten 100% on all the tests. Idk if I'm explaining it well but you know how little kids don't find adult logic obvious at first. "Why am I memorizing a list of 26 numbers?" No idea dude I just do what I'm told.

  1. I sometimes realize I've spelled a word wrong because the color looks wrong. I chronically spell "separate" as "seperate" but the latter doesn't look red enough because "a"s are red and "e"s are purple.

  2. I can use colored pencils to record a string of numbers on paper, like part of a password, by drawing little boxes in various colors. It's like a personal encryption device. This is probably the most useful though it's quite limited, especially since 2 and 9 are awfully close in color.

This is largely limited to Latin script and Arabic numerals. Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese look like nothing to me. Greek is a bit red, white and blue/black, Korean is a little blue, and Cryilic is a bit yellow and blue, but mostly, I don't see much with unfamiliar characters. As an experiment, I decided to start "learning" Russian on duolingo to see if maybe knowing the language would force the issue. 5 months later I'm here to report the results:

Resounding success. ж which makes a "zh" sound looks purplish/brown to me, and "z" looks purple and "h" looks brown so makes sense. б is sounds like and is brown like a "b". л is yellow and sounds like an "l". д is brown like "d" which it also sounds like. "C", which sounds like "s" in Russian, has gotten more yellow, just like how I see "s" in English. So I think for the most part the sound the phenomes make is the primary influence, at least when learning a new language.

Are there any words that are particularly pretty/ugly/interesting due to the colours, or the pattern of the colours? Like maybe there's one that makes a rainbow, or an alternating -_-_-_- pattern or something like that.

Xylophone is ugly, so is elephant. Christmas is nice, but I am not in on any patterns

I might not have phrased that very well. When I say patterns I mean like blue-green-blue-green-blue, or maybe words that have palindromic colours but not letters. Not literal graphic patterns.

Can you describe what is good/bad about xylophone, elephant and Christmas?

https://i.imgur.com/JQgRffz.png

I spelled out the three words, respectively, and a couple others which don't qualify as answers to your question but is as close as I got while thinking about it. Words look more like the spray paint effect ones than the explicitly colored ones. I simply don't like/like the arrangement of colors for the first three. You may see that I made "n" red in the spray paint ones but orange in 'Banana' and 'Coconut'; it's slightly 'orangier' than the red indicated in the first two but I got a bit lazy about it. I like "Coconut" as a word and I think that's mainly because C is green and actually the only letter that is green, whereas b d f g h t and to a certain extent e and r are shades of brown, I am starting to feel like if I keep talking about what graphemes are what colors I'll come off as narcissistic lol

I can't reach Imgur. Any chance you can rehost it here?

Lemme give this a shot

/images/17942517685076623227287b6f4.webp

Ever since I was a child I've assigned sexes to letters in the alphabet. I didn't realise this was a form of synaesthesia until a few years ago. It sometimes leads me to assign unintuitive connotations to words based on what the initial letter is.

Vowels are female, especially a, consonants are male, especially plosives.

Why is it Die Bart, die, then?

Wild possibility: Romance languages have gendered nouns because of a few synesthesia grammarians pulling this shit

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats