The physics of phonetic symbolism

Or rather, the phonetic symbolism of (an aspect of physics), as illustrated by a recent xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation."

Wikipedia says that the bouba/kiki effect

…was first observed by Georgian psychologist Dimitri Uznadze in a 1924 paper ["Ein experimenteller Beitrag zum Problem der psychologischen Grundlagen der Namengebung"]. He conducted an experiment with 10 participants who were given a list with nonsense words, shown six drawings for five seconds each, then instructed to pick a name for the drawing from the list of given words.

Aleksandra Ćwiek et al., "The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems", 2022, gives this version of the history:

The cited papers are the 1929 and 1947 editions of Köhler's Gestalt Psychology, and Ramachandran and Hubbard's 2001 paper "Synaesthesia — a window into perception, thought and language".

In any case, the topic and the bouba/kiki name have been a PR success. Google Scholar finds 2580 papers via a search for "bouba kiki effect",

A few relevant LLOG posts:

"Ask Language Log: Sounds and Meanings", 3/9/2008 "Waza waza", 4/20/2008 "Phonetic marketing", 10/23/2010 "Response to Jasmin and Casasanto's response to me", 3/17/2012 "Sinitic ideophones", 5/14/2022