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by kibwen 807 days ago
What if I asked you to visualize a wogembibobble rolling off a table, would you be able to visualize it, and if so would you say it has a color? And if you're curious what a wogembibobble is, all that you need to know is precisely what can be inferred from the question: it's something that's cabable of rolling, and all other variables are free. When I do this exercise, I visualize a bulbous-tentacled blobby sort of slime rolling off the table, but although I can't imagine it without giving it a shape (and even a texture, apparently), I can imagine it without giving it a color. I don't pretend to know how this works, and I assume other people will have different experiences.
3 comments

A wogembibobble is definitely going to look blobby, because the word is firmly on the bouba side of the kiki/bouba distinction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

I imagined something about the size of a duck made up of hundreds of little brass pistons and cam shafts, and as all the little pieces move it makes the whole thing move sort of like an amoeba. So when it rolls off the table it’s kind of like if you rolled a blob of mercury off a table - but it rolls itself, and there’s more clicky clockwork sounds.
I visualised a steel gömböc rolling on a dark wooden table, lit from above by a spotlight in an otherwise dark room.