We are all synesthetes to a certain extent.

Synesthesia is a human condition in which stimulation of one sense leads the person to think of or experience another sense.  Creative people have long been aware of this. In the 19th century Beaudelaire wrote poems in which smell, sound and color interacted.  His friend, Verlaine described the white light of the moon as creating sound in the trees it was lighting.  And their pal Rimbaud's poem, "Voyelles" begins:,

        A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,
         I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins....

Elsewhere in this blog I have written about how useful it is to teach English vowel pronunciation using the Color Vowel® Chart and System created by Karen Taylor and Shirley Thompson in 1999.

Now, in the 21st century, a number of institutions have turned to the scientific study of crossmodal processing in the human brain.  One of these, published in 2019, showed that, not just synesthetes, but the large majority of human beings do map vowel sounds to colors even if they have not been not consciously aware of it.  Wow!

This was a a collaborative venture of Radboud University, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and NTR Broadcasting.  To read about this research, go to https://neurosciencenews.com/color-vowel-synesthesia-10999/

Even though I'm pretty good at finding what I want via Google, it was darned hard to find this paper.  Now that I've subscribed to neurosciencenews.com, though, I've been getting emails about other studies, too.

To be continued...

Here's a great word that shouldn't be obsolete.

 Thanks to Linda Green at the Alive and Mortal group on Facebook.

Another example of the importance of punctuation.

 Thanks to "Simplistically Living" on Facebook for the following:

Hurrah!

 I have an actual, paid ESL job! It's very part-time but promises to be quite satisfying.

This semester I am teaching ESL to adults on Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 5:30PM to 8:00PM at Eaglecrest High School.  I won't be working directly for the Cherry Creek school district but am employed by thelearingsource.org (TLS), a non-profit that provides adult ESL classes to various districts in Colorado.

At present I have seven students: three who speak Spanish and four who speak Russian.

It will be fun having them all in the classroom. However I do hope to get them set up to go on Zoom, on their phones if nothing else, in case of snow days.

Of course if I do get everything prepared, satisfactorily, for snow days, that means we probably won't have any.  It's like carrying an umbrella.

I lost all my browser bookmarks this morning...

 ...and then, after spending the rest of the day trying to get them restored, I ran into the cartoon, below.  It seemed apt, somehow.

We forget how much of our current capabilities depends on maintaining very, sophisticated systems and networks.  Thanks to ReignOfReads on Facebook for the reminder.

Another Fun Pronunciation Poem

 Thanks to the "Poetry Lovers" group on Facebook.

Are the letters "ueue" really silent?

Thanks to Good Book Fairy on Facebook for the following observations.

And now the question of the day.  If "queue" is a BLUE MOON word, are "ueue" really silent letters or are they technically the "oooo" sound?