Let's have a bouba
BOOBS, n. This term for breasts shows up in print in US English for the first time in 1929, which means people were saying it before that. “Boobies” is older than just plain “boobs,” and it’s a variation on “bubbies,” which goes all the way back to the 1600s in British English. The OED says the origin is probably “imitative or expressive,” and that’s where things get exciting.
Linguistics concepts and experiments always have the best names, like “the wug test” and “the bouba/kiki effect,” and it’s the latter that I’m gonna talk about right now. Basically, the experiment is that you show people this picture of shapes and say “which one is ‘bouba’ and which one is ‘kiki’?”
Two flat gray shapes, the left with sharp angles and points and the right with a rounded, blob shape.
Like, obviously the rounder one is “bouba,” right?
Right!
Most people identify the curvy shape as “bouba” and the pointy shape as “kiki.” It’s late so I’m not gonna get into all the details, but for sighted, neurotypical people, this effect is really strong.
This is a big deal because one of the other big ideas about language is Ferdinand de Saussure’s “arbitrariness of the sign”: whatever sound we make to identify a concept is pretty much random. There’s nothing about a tree that means you have to use the sounds “tree” to talk about it—and non-English speakers don’t. They say “arbre” or “per” or “déntro” or “shù.” There’s no right or wrong here. We all just assigned different sounds to the concept of “a woody perennial plant.”
Even within English, the language I speak natively, a lot of words do have a pretty obscure connection to the concept they represent. I personally am getting a lot of mileage out of the arbitrariness of the sign because I get to write this newsletter every week answering a variation of the question “why do we say [insert word here] to talk about [concept]?” If signs weren’t arbitrary, I wouldn’t get to do that because we’d be communicating in some impossibly transparent ideal language and we’d all just know. (Boring.)
We don’t live in that world. But the thing about the bouba/kiki effect is that it shows us that maybe not all signs are arbitrary, which is pretty fucking cool. A lot of us have a pretty strong impulse to use back vowels (like “ou”) and voiced plosives (like “b”) or nasals (like “m”) to talk about curvy shapes. That is to say, we see a soft round thing and we point at it and go “boob.”
In Capital-R Romance, I read some of Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Cambrioleur because we watched Lupin on Netflix and I wanted to know that the original was like. The show does such a good job capturing Lupin’s always-one-step-ahead cleverness. I feel like I could watch and read about heists for ages and not get bored. For the record, heists are kiki, not bouba.
In small-r romance (bouba all the way), I read
Haven (m/f, both cis and het?, contemporary, erotic) by Rebekah Weatherspoon. I almost classified this as “romantic suspense” because it does start with one protagonist rescuing the other from a murderer in the woods, but after the intense beginning, it turns into a book about two people helping each other recover from trauma in a little mountain cabin and it’s actually very cozy—and kinky. Some of the lines about what it’s like to live through a traumatic event—“there is Before Claudia and After Claudia”—really resonated with me. Anyway, this was such an engrossing read and I’m so glad there are more Rebekah Weatherspoon books waiting for me. The world is a hard place to live, but people can find comfort in each other—and in books like this. Content warnings: murder, sibling death (by murder, during the story), parental death (by car accident, prior to the story), parental neglect (prior to the story), grief, trauma, sex, BDSM.
Fireheart Tiger (cis lesbian f/non-human f?, fantasy, novella) by Aliette de Bodard. This is such a rich little novella, following the princess of a fantasy country inspired by Vietnam as she tries to stop encroaching colonists, make her mother proud, navigate flirtations and proposals, and keep her mysterious fire magic from setting anything else aflame. As always, De Bodard crafts beautiful sentences. I feel like I write “but how is this much story and feeling possible in such a small wordcount?” every time I read a novella, especially one of hers, but that’s because I don’t know the answer yet. The technique on display here gives me almost the same pleasure as watching or reading about a heist. Maybe I should read it again. Content warnings: fear of being outed.
I encountered some really thoughtful, moving commentary on romance this week, courtesy of NPR’s Code Switch doing an episode Black Kiss-tory where they interview a panel of Black historical romance authors and talk about the importance of highlighting Black joy. They also released extra content from the episode in the form of an interview with Beverly Jenkins.
I also enjoyed Dr. Angela Toscano’s two episodes on the podcast Shelf Love where she talks about Northrop Frye’s The Secular Scripture and popular romance. In particular, this idea has stayed with me:
I do think that there is an urge by some people who want to give [popular romance] the veneer of respectability, but I'm on the side of the disreputable. I like romances being disreputable. I think its value is in its disreputability.
I like romance being disreputable, too. February 14 brings a lot of insulting articles every year, so I often see fellow romance readers and writers working hard to convince people outside the genre that romance doesn’t deserve their scorn. I have sometimes engaged in that, but I can’t do it all the time: There’s an endless supply of scorn in the world and I’m going to die some day. Mostly what I want is to talk the people who already know. It makes me think of this Ray Bradbury line, which I believe is from Zen in the Art of Writing:
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
No more twitter fights for me. From now on I’m packing up my searing kisses and leaving the room.
