Pursuant to my discussion of synesthesia, I decided on a lark to tabulate my color mappings. The first is for days of the week; the second is for letters of the alphabet. I don’t have number-color associations.
| Day of the Week | Color (desc) |
|---|---|
| Sunday | red-orange |
| Monday | orange-yellow |
| Tuesday | deep green |
| Wednesday | red |
| Thursday | mint green |
| Friday | purple |
| Saturday | blue |
| Letter | Color (desc) |
|---|---|
| A | red |
| B | dirty yellow |
| C | ash grey |
| D | deep green |
| E | cerulean |
| F | purple |
| G | brown |
| H | peach-biege |
| I | white |
| J | yellow-orange |
| K | pink |
| L | lavender |
| M | orange-yellow |
| N | orange-yellow |
| O | black |
| P | violet-blue |
| Q | silver-grey |
| R | purple |
| S | blue |
| T | deep green |
| U | grey |
| V | orange |
| W | maroon |
| X | white-grey |
| Y | red |
| Z | yellow-green |
I need to do a lot more thinking about this. What struck me while talking about it the other night was that I have an extremely vivid physical layout of these items. For example, the months of the year are contorted in an elliptical Möbius strip of sorts. My perspective always hovers around May or June, then zooms in on the other parts of the year, which change in elevation and tilt as well as color and character.
My days of the week are the same. Colors, for sure, but most strongly a physical placement in relation to one another.
Letters never were markedly colored for me, but numbers vary in color, size, and placement on a landscape.
Hunh. That sounds a lot like number-form synesthesia.
In talking with my brother, I’ve discovered that he seems to more or less have distinctly visual associations, likely introduced by magnetic color sets: he says that he has a recognizable pattern (ROYGBIV, I think) that repeats across the alphabet:
Whereas my mappings seem to be at least partly influence by the sound of the letter: hence, my dentals are both green; the nasals are both orange-yellow.
Did your brother offer any theories for the origin of his color associations? I picture an alphabet posted above the blackboard in kindergarten, or perhaps even earlier. I really think that he picked that association up from a distinct presentation of the alphabet or letters, rather than building it himself in some “synthesis of the senses.”
Letters for me remain color-neutral. I think of letters in terms of typefaces, of whether the letter is capital or lowercase, italicized or not, etc. But no colors.
Overall my experience is pretty much confined to time quantification: days of the week, months of the year, decades, centuries, millennia/epochs, even seconds. Seconds don’t pass around the face of a clock, they kind of teeter on a crumbling precipice until about 5 seconds, then fall and flow as a river at least through the 30 second mark.
I wonder where my association with that comes from? I’d like to say that I saw a cartoon or something while little, and for some reason there was a clock nearby, and the two experiences melded, but on second thought, it seems that this pattern would fit rather well onto the face of a clock.
Also, I suggest you edit the post and colorize your color words. Keep the verbal part (“ash grey”) but try to find a corresponding color value. The coloration in the comment above was quite helpful.
I thought about assigning a hex value in a colored cell, but that’d take a while, hunting through a color wheel.
True. You do that, and your total figure for books read this year would totally be less than 100.
We can’t have that; nosirree. What kind of fly-by-night operation do you think I’m running here.