Science! And fun!

This one is for the language lovers: you can participate in an online study that maps relationships among words. You can do it more than once if that kind of thing floats your boat. They're trying to get a whopping n, so you can share it with your pals if your pals are also into that kind of thing. Plus we can talk about in the comments. Quick, what are the first three words you think of when I say perch?

Comments

[Tracy]

walleye, fish, kids.

[Pigwotflies]

Fish, parrot, ledge. N

[Jody]

Fish. Porch. Bird.

I'm sorry, I tend to be fuzzy in the morning.

[Miriel]

Bird, fish, chair

[Kathy]

bird, alight, fish

[Ellie]

Bird fish wire

[Kristin]

Bird
Fish
Sit

[Debs]

Fish, parrot, claw

[Pippi]

sit, tree, bird

[Melanie B]

perch: fish, bird, stand

I do love word associations. I've gone back and done that one a great many times. My sister and I used to play a word association game. One night it was quite late and we were lying in bed talking in the dark instead of going to sleep. She said Nagasaki and I said ligthbulb and that had us roaring in laughter for hours for some reason. The kind of thing that can only be funny at the moment and you can't explain why. Probably in part because when faced with a great horror you can either laugh or cry. But I think the unconscious association between the two words in my mind was from the film Empire of the Sun when Jamie sees the atomic bomb and says it looked "like God taking a photograph" and somehow that became atom bomb-->photograph-->flashbulb-->lightbulb or something like that, with all the middle terms gone. And that's the funny thing about word association, when what we grab on to is not the immediate association but really a few steps removed but the whole thing goes so fast that we sort of miss the steps in between and the word pair seems a little incongruous.