Best.Question.Ever.

November 17, 2011 7:30 PM

Good news everyone! I'm wasting an Ask on the term for hearing things in Professor Farnsworth's voice.

So, you know that phenomenon where you read a certain set of words and hear those words, in your head, in a very specific voice? Good news everyone! comes to mind immediately, as does Best.< insert thing here >.Ever.

Is there a word for this? Have there been any particularly interesting articles or papers written on it (or posts on the blue)? I'm interested in it, I suppose, as a cultural phenomenon: there are subsets of our culture who get this for specific words and some that don't.

posted by AmandaA to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

I'd go with simply quotation or catch phrase, heard in the original voice. Things a little less tied to a particular person or voice would be frozen idioms or bound collocations. To make some hay, philosophically, out of the phenomenon going on in your head, you could look at anything inspired by Bakhtin on dialogism and polyphony, e.g. the dialogical self.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 7:54 PM on November 17, 2011

I don't know if there's an overarching term for it, but I'd describe it as the inner monologue being influenced by a strong character voice.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:56 PM on November 17, 2011

Someone clever is making a term up right now. I call it, farnsworthing.
posted by shownomercy at 8:11 PM on November 17, 2011 [6 favorites]

Yeah, something like an internal characterization. Maybe there are academic terms for it.
posted by rhizome at 8:28 PM on November 17, 2011

I call it frinking, as in the the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.
posted by flabdablet at 9:17 PM on November 17, 2011 [10 favorites]

I dunno if it has a real name, but according to reliable sources (i.e. Urban Dictionary + Google) people refer to it as the Farnsworth Phenomenon.
posted by Deflagro at 11:05 PM on November 17, 2011