TenPoundHammer wrote: ↑Mon Apr 23, 2018 10:39 pm
seaborgium wrote: ↑Mon Apr 23, 2018 10:38 pm
TenPoundHammer wrote: ↑Mon Apr 23, 2018 6:22 pm
Or when people do get a top box that I feel is obscure, and their best reason is "I just kinda sorta vaguely took a stab at it". Like all the people who said they got Silver Spring = Maryland in the top box, and their reason was uniformly "I kinda sorta barely vaguely felt it way in the back of my head".
Seaborgium himself said:
it jibed with the shape (of the writing), sound (of the words), and feel (of speaking them) that crystallized in my mind when presented with “Silver Spring” and the imaginary blank I gave it to fill.
That has to be the most nebulous path to a top box get that I've ever seen in my life. A completely shot in the dark WAG with nothing but "It sounds right" being what led you to the correct response.
I'm sorry that "the square peg fits in the square hole" is obscure for you.
"Silver Spring, Kentucky" and "Silver Spring, Florida" and "Silver Spring, Ohio" all "jibe with the shape of the writing" just as well to me, probably even better than Maryland does. Do you perhaps have synesthesia?
What part of there being three sensory components to my memory of words and phrases didn't you understand? "Jibe" didn't mean "go nicely with"; it meant "fit physically."
I once saw a TED talk where Daniel Tammet attempted to have the audience guess about the meaning of the Icelandic word
hnugginn because his synesthetic reaction to the word happened to jibe with the meaning of it and (if I correctly understood what he was getting at) he assumed that that reaction should be universal to English speakers. The audience guessed wrong: the word means "sad," and the audience failed the 50/50 with "happy." (I got it wrong too, seeing the word maybe as a mixture of "hug" and "snuggle" and getting warmth and comfort, and therefore happiness, out of it.)
My point in bringing that up is that I didn't guess Maryland in a vacuum where I had a synesthetic response to "Silver Spring" with absolutely no facts to go on; I guessed it as someone who has certainly encountered "Silver Spring, Maryland" in spoken word or writing before without being entirely sure exactly where, and, much like when I sing along with a song I haven't thought about, let alone heard, in years (successfully, word for word and note for note), knew exactly what came next upon hearing Silver Spring. I was trying to explain that my memory of words and phrases is auditory, visual, and tactile, which made Maryland much more than a 2% shot in the dark that happened to land in the right spot.