Synaesthesia
Synaesthesia is a figure of speech that describes one sense in terms of another: a sound given a colour, a colour given a temperature, a taste given a shape. The name comes from the neurological condition in which one sensory pathway triggers a second, so that a person hears a note and sees a colour, or sees a colour in a letter or a number. As a literary device it borrows the vocabulary of one sense to report an experience that belongs to another.
The crossed senses make an experience sound private and hard to translate, something a listener can only approach through a sense that does not strictly apply. Uncle Jerry calls it synaesthetic metaphor: the sensory term stands in for an emotional experience that has no direct name, which suits experiences a speaker presents as unrepeatable.
Appears in 1 song
“You showed me colors you know I can't see with anyone else”
Uncle Jerry identifies synaesthesia in the line, explaining the device explicitly: 'Synaesthesia is when one cognitive pathway triggers another pathway. So you show colours that you can't see with anyone else.' He notes that some people see colours associated with musical notes, days, numbers, or letters, and calls this a 'synesthetic metaphor' where the colours stand for the emotional experience of the affair. He rewrites the line in his own words: 'You introduced me to emotional and behavioural experiences so unique from ordinary experience that I can't get it elsewhere.'
The synaesthetic image captures an experience that cannot be translated into ordinary language. The colours the speaker sees with this person exist only in this relationship, which is both the affair's greatest gift and its deepest trap.