Officially weird

Hubby and I were going out the other day and we started talking about dropping in at a supermarket on the way home.

"Is that the green one?", I asked, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a supermarket to be defined by a colour, and thus ensued a strange conversation about the various colours of supermarkets. In fact, in my mind Asda is green (I think most people would agree with this one), Sainsburys, orange; Tesco is blue and Morrisons is yellow. Spar is red and that's the way it's always been.

After a bit of discussion, I came to realise that on the whole, these colours equate to the dominant colour of the logo, and have nothing at all to do with the writing and in fact, I think Tesco is blue just because that's the colour of clubcards^*1. It's odd, but I've always thought of things as being a colour first before anything - the pink house, not number 12 or the green petrol station, not BP. After colour, then I think about shape, so I can tell you about a software icon (it's orange and looks like a Z) before I could tell you what the package is called in most cases (and certainly before I can spell it!)

Even odder, is that when I read, I look for shapes of words,^*2 rather than reading them aloud in my head. It can be handy, recognising shapes of sections in a book - if you forget who a character is, you might know that you first meet them about halfway through, on a facing page in a paragraph shaped a certain way. All this I find completely normal and hubby does not - hubby thinks I am distinctly weird! He reads words first - he recognises cars by reading the badge on the back rather than knowing the shape of the body and hears voices in his head when he reads books. I think this is weird, but then I guess anyone with voices in their head has to be a little odd ;-)

We got to wondering then why this is. Is this just a similar thing to Synesthesia where you see sounds as colours like Duke Ellington (or even colours as sound, like David Hockney)? Or is the colour thing and the shape thing completely unconnected? Hubby reckoned that maybe it was the way you were taught to read - whether if you learned a, bu, cu, (a,b,c), then you would read 'properly' (his way), but if you learned cat, sat, mat, then you would just recognise the shape of the word and that was 'just plain weird'! He seemed to be suggesting that whoever taught me to read did it all wrong.

I hotly protested that my brother taught me to read before I went to school and asked hubby if he was being so mean as to suggest that my brother was weird.

"I rest my case" he said triumphantly!

Well, I call that cheeky in the extreme and as my brother and I outnumber him 2 to 1, I think we'll go with hearing voices in your head as being more strange than seeing things!

^*1 A rewards card for the store
^*2 An odd thing about doing this is that some words look very similar - one I always have problems with is Shopfitters, which I somehow always read as Shoplifters. Always thought it was a strange business to run and not one you'd necessarily want to advertise!