The Taste of Words on the Tip of the Tongue

I read an amazing article in the New York Times (via Nature) about lexical-gustatory synaesthetes. People who have synaesthesia experience more than one sense at a time. In the most common form, they “see” numbers or letters or musical notes as colors. For example, a synaesthete might see the number 4 as dark green. The word synaesthesia comes from two Greek words, syn (union) and aesthesis (perception). Therefore, synaesthesia literally means “joined perception.”

Rare as grapheme-color synaesthesia is, there is an even rarer variation, says Julia Simner and Jamie Ward, cognitive neuropsychologists at the University of Edinburgh. Lexical-gustatories involuntarily “taste” words when they hear them, or even try to recall them. Magnetic-resonance imaging indicates they are not faking; the correct words light up the taste regions of their brains. Dr. Simner has yet to figure out any logic to the choices, as this quote from the NY Times article explains:

For example, the word “mince” makes one subject taste mincemeat, but so do rhymes like “prince.” Words with a soft “g,” as in “roger” or “edge,” make him taste sausage. But another subject, hearing “castanets,” tastes tuna fish. Another can taste only proper names: John is his cornbread, William his potatoes.

I wonder what Grammar Cracker would taste like to a lexical-gustatory synaesthete? Hopefully, it would be dark chocolate and raspberry.

Public Domain Day

When the calendar rolls over on January 1st of each year, thousands of books, articles, photographs, works of art, music scores, and unpublished documents go out of copyright and become the common property of the citizens of a given country, giving them the opportunity for cultural renewal and intellectual exploration in all fields of human activity and interest.

CopyrightWatch has posted two lists of authors (including musicians and other creators of art) whose works went out of copyright as of January 1, 2007: one for those countries (the majority) where copyright subsists for fifty years after the author’s death and one for “the quarter or so of the world where the copyright term has foolishly been extended to life+70.”

Among the “life+50” authors, musicians, and scientists are H.L. Mencken, American journalist and author; Art Tatum, American jazz pianist; Walter de la Mare, English poet, short story writer, and novelist; A. A. Milne, English author (Winnie the Pooh); Irène Joliot-Curie, French physicist; Max Beerbohm, English theater critic; Jackson Pollock, American painter; and Clarence E. Mulford, American adventure novelist (Hopalong Cassidy).

Among the “life+70” group are Oswald Spengler, German historian and polymath; G. K. Chesterton, English author; A.E. Housman, English scholar and poet; Maxim Gorky, Russian author; García Lorca, Spanish poet and dramatist; Lincoln Steffens, pioneering American “muckraker” journalist; Gustave Kahn, French Symbolist poet and art critic; and Rudyard Kipling, British author and poet (The Jungle Book, Gunga Din).

CopyrightWatch concludes, “The dead hand of dead-letter copyright is lifted on the works of these, and many other authors and composers, and lesser-known ordinary people who left a cultural legacy. Modern-day creative people, historians, academics, and citizens of all interests, can recreate and build on the legacy they left us.”

Long live the public domain!

Buzzwords of 2006

Words and phrases reveal much about our national concerns and interests. Here are a few of the terms that became prominent in 2006, courtesy of the New York Times.

• Food Miles: the number of miles food has traveled to get to your plate. This generates more decision making: Are organic grapes really worth the jet fuel that carried them from Chile? Is it better to support the local garlic farmer or the one in China?
• Hummer House: an overly large single-family residence. Synonyms from earlier years are starter castle and McMansion.
• Internet Courage: boldness of character that comes from the anonymity and distance inherent in Internet communication.
• Katrina Brain: forgetfulness, lack of concentration and failure to follow through on activities, characteristic of the post-traumatic stress of Hurricane Katrina.
• Seven-thousand-mile Screwdriver: micromanagement of a situation from afar. Lately used to describe the difficulties of managing the war in Iraq.
• Sneeze: a television advertisement shorter than 15 seconds.
• Snowflakes: term used by Pentagon employees for memos sent in blizzards from the third-floor executive suite of Donald H. Rumsfeld. Ironically, Rumsfeld, who vowed to push technological transformation on the military, dictated his snowflakes into an aged tape recorder to be typed onto hard copies by his assistant.
• Sudden Jihad Syndrome: an outburst of violence from a seemingly stable and normal Muslim.