When I met my husband and found out his name was Philip, I felt conflicted. I liked him as a person but his name tasted like crunchy green pears and I don’t like green pears at all. My compromise was to call him Phil, which tastes more like stewed pear – sweeter and not as crunchy. It’s just a nicer-tasting name in my mind.
Fortunately I was 30 by the time I met Phil, so I had an explanation for my word-taste associations, after years of strange looks from family and friends. I had lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, one of the rarest forms of the phenomenon, in which words or sounds trigger taste sensations. Researchers estimate it affects just 0.2% of the population.
