Strange Brain

Ever since I can remember, I have considered colors (represented best by the Crayola 8 we used in early grades) to have gender: blue, purple, yellow, and orange are girls, and red, green, brown, and black are boys.

I can remember coloring in kindergarten or first grade and the girls and boys even had distinct personalities (still do): purple is the heroine, blue the mean girl, orange plain and sweet; red is the prince, green the snide iago, brown the stalwart friend.

Obviously, these assignments have something to do with society and my personal tastes—purple has always been my favorite color, and green is often associated with sickness and jealousy. But those explanations only go so far, because I was awfully young, and the sex assignment isn't limited to colors.

I have come to discover that this sexing of inanimate objects (and I'm not even French!) extends to many other categories: numbers, letters, even shapes. The numbers have personalities like the colors do, but not the letters so much.

An accounting:

Girls

3, 4, 7, 9, 13, 14, 17, 19 (higher numbers are just mixed, both feminine and masculine)

a c e f o p q s u v w y

circle, triangle, heptagon

Boys

1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18 (0 itself is neuter)

b d g h i j k l m n r t x z

square, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, octagon

I don't know how to explain how ingrained these sexes are. I don't have to sit here and ponder it, "r" just "is" masculine, "4" just "is" feminine. And although I tuned in to the phenomenon only recently (except for the colors, which I've realized for many years), it goes as far back as my memory.

Is this related to synesthesia? (that would be cool!) Anyone out there know what I'm talking about?