Alejandra
Alright, and we’re kicking off the night of synesthesia name taste-testing. I’ve got some good ones in my inbox but I’ve also got some final week homework to do so I’m going to be grouping them into little chunks over this evening!
Alejandra: an Orange Julius, which is a sweetened drink made with crushed frozen orange juice, but also with a tiny bit of bitterness at the end, like you took a drink and then licked or bit a parsley leaf.
Ren: it tastes like the air when you open the back of a chicken coop, that dusty animal bedding feathery taste I always got when I was doing chores, but not in an unpleasant way, just an earthy one. (Keep in mind that I grew up caring for dozens of animals so this is a nostalgia smell/taste for me.) Not all the tastes are food tastes but this is a cool one!
As for the question, they do! Since the words are structured differently in different languages the letters and sounds trip different mental wiring. “Cat” tastes like a hot crispy churro, but “gato” tastes like avacado.
And languages overall have a large taste too if I zoom out (the same way that a voice has a flavor or a person’s writing style has a flavor.) German as a whole tastes like coleslaw and meatloaf, Spanish as a whole tastes like spicy salsa and some kind of paste, like if hummus were a sweet food?
