Bouba, kiki and the word choices we make
Romeo and Juliet. The play — or alternatively, the movie.
You know the basics: Romeo is a Montague, Juliet is a Capulet. It’s love at first sight, but they’re from rival families so, to use modern parlance, it’s complicated.
Once Juliet finds out that Romeo is a Montague, she laments:
’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
It’s a fair point — I’m not going to sit here and tell you that calling a rose something else will have an impact upon the chemical composition of the aroma of the flower, but the naming of things isn’t completely arbitrary, and word choices can influence our behaviour.
Take a look at these two shapes, for example. One of them is ‘bouba’ and one of them is ‘kiki’, but which is which?
Chances are, you reckon that the spiky one on the left is ‘kiki’ and the one on the right is ‘bouba’ but it’s hard to say why exactly. ‘Kiki’ just looks like a typical ‘kiki’ would look like, right?
This phenomenon is known as the bouba/kiki effect and it was first documented nearly a century ago. Wolfgang Köhler conducted a study on Tenerife in 1929 with ‘takete’ and ‘baluba’ as the names of the shapes. He asked participants to tell him which of the shapes was ‘takete’ and which one was ‘baluba’. You probably have a fair idea of what the majority of participants said.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated the study with American college students and Tamil speakers in India in 2001, using the names ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’ for the shapes. Participants in both groups overwhelmingly identified the spiky, pointy shape as ‘kiki’ and the more rounded, curvy shape as ‘bouba’. With the two groups situated halfway across the world from one another, with different native languages, this couldn’t be explained away by something like ‘bouba’ being unconsciously associated with a word like ‘bubble’ by native English speakers or any other cultural quirk that was influencing participants’ decisions.
So what does this have to do with anything?
Well, it highlights the fact that we tend to link abstract shapes and sounds in a fairly consistent way, and this is something we probably do with real words and phrasing too. To bring things around to a Wayfair context, think of sofas and the words we tend to use to describe them. They’re cosy, they’re comfy, they’re somewhere you can relax. If you had to put these words next to one of the shapes above, which one would it be? These words have a semantic meaning to English speakers, sure, but the abstract sound behind them also helps to bring across their meaning.
This is why our word choices matter when describing items in the home. Let’s go back to ‘comfy’ and bring in ‘comfortable’ — which one of these would best describe a chair for the home office that many of us have had to set up in recent months? You want a desk chair to be comfortable, but is one that’s comfy going too far? Would you get any work done or would you end up having naps between video calls?
Similarly, if a sofa is described to you as comfortable rather than comfy, are you more likely to sit up straight? I think I would, and that’s maybe because ‘comfy’ is just that little bit more ‘bouba’. The second half of the word ‘comfortable’, that’s just a bit spiky right? Sure, it’s not ‘kiki’ to the max, but those rounded edges we associate with ‘bouba’ are maybe just a teeny bit sharper.
These are the small details that can make big differences. Every word is somewhere on the bouba/kiki spectrum and the words we choose can convey an intention or mood. At this stage, do I want to hurry you along to the end of the article with short, sharp statements? Or would I have you slow things down, take it easy, maybe ponder about a thing or two you didn’t know much about a few minutes ago?
Either way, for Juliet, it’s not going to work out with that boy. And if we do decide to rebrand and call a rose a ‘grudgen’ or an ‘umpel’ from here on in, let me think about whether I’m all that keen to be the first person to sniff it.
