Hello hello SuperForest
Facebook is home to a host of groups – some helpful, some not-so, and some just plain weird – but every so often I come across one that gives me a smile. Finding LOVE in all the wrong places is a collection of photos of “love hearts hidden in this world of ours … keep them peeled and see that love is all around” – from tangled cables, to gum on the street, to…a mouth ulcer?
Once you’ve looked at a few of these pictures, you start to see random little hearts everywhere!
Pareidolia – the tendency to see meaningful shapes in random arrangements is well documented – from religious icons on toast to a map of Estonia in a doormat. Fascinating cartographic blog Strange Maps has coined the terms “cartocacoethes” and “cartococcygia” for seeing maps everywhere: “Cacoethes is a Greek word used to express uncontrollable urge or desire, especially for something harmful. Strange Maps might be prejudiced, but we think seeing maps everywhere is harmless, if not downright beneficial. A somewhat friendlier term for the condition suggested by one of the commenters in the original post is cartococcygia. Literally: maps built by cuckoos – analogous to nephelococcygia (a term for seeing shapes in clouds, from The Birds by Aristophanes, literally: clouds built by cuckoos)”.
Nice! Is there a term for seeing hearts everywhere? I couldn’t find one… so how about AMOcoccygia? Love built by cuckoos?
Love
P
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