kiki: sharp, precise, particular
bouba: loose, round, soft
I’ve always been a little Kiki when it comes to.. most things, really. I was reminded of this while talking to a close friend of mine. We’ve been pretty close for almost a decade now— suffice to say we know each other pretty well and have talked about various things under the sun. We were reflecting on our friendship and relationship a bit, how it has evolved etc and something that came up was a difference of ours. This is one of the few differences that has persisted over the decade— he’s a little bit Bouba and I’m a little bit Kiki.
In conversation, I tend to be quite Kiki. I’ll always be the one thinking-frowning at words that I don’t think fit very well and at generalisations and at vague descriptions of problems and (although this is unrelated) unsolicited advice.
With some people, this results in great things, we collaborate to find words that fit better, we learn a little more about each other every time we strike off a generalisation and discuss how the generalisation may not apply even to us as data points, and we get closer to the sub-problems that we’re interested in talking or thinking about. (Even if that problem is a very simple and mundane one, like where should we hang out the next time we meet. Side note on calling this “open question” a problem is pretty Bouba of me but ah, well.)
So anyway, I suppose these people are equally or more Kiki than I am and so they’re okay with deep-diving into precision ABOUT the things I want to get more precise about.
What happens when you talk to someone who’s not as Kiki about the same topics as you are, then? I am often met with resistance. They give me reactions like “ah, well you know what I mean don’t you” or “why are so fixated on x y z when that was clearly not the point of me talking about a b c” etc. And I’m okay to take that feedback, I think I’ve gotten a little bit better at being a little more Bouba with different people in different situations. Like yes, maybe sometimes being pedantic is really just coming in the way of transference of feelings. In a way, when I’m pedantic when the other person doesn’t want me to be, there’s of course a disconnect that they might feel. They might feel misunderstood, or like they’ve said— they might just feel like in the moment I (the listener) might be focusing on the wrong thing.
This makes sense. For people like me then, it becomes important to discern when there is a “discussion” or a “debate” happening, and perhaps when it’s just feelings being shared.
But what about when Kikiness is actually really useful? How do I communicate that to people? Like there are some people who are so Bouba that they get defensive about any examination of the things they’re expressing.
Maybe it does just come down to discernment. One of my friends does this pretty well, he might say: “I disagree with the use of the word XYZ here, but I know what you mean”. And then if I want to open a thread there, we can do that. If I don’t, we carry on with the original conversation.
I don’t know, I thought I was going to go somewhere with this, I really wanted to make a case of “when can being Kiki be useful”, but I’m gong to test out my discernment theory a little more in conversation from now on and then see where that takes me.
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