This paper considers parallels in the poetics of everyday life in both Central Asia and Meso-America. Sound is difficult to describe. While certain professionals (like linguists) may have expert vocabularies dedicated to the task of sound description, speakers of many languages around the world rely on the vocabulary of more tangible domains, like space and size, extending them to talk about the intangible domain of sound. English is an example of a split system where one dimension has dedicated vocabulary, like “quiet” vs “loud”, but the dimension of pitch uses spatial metaphors “high” and “low”. We present the language of sound in three unrelated languages—Farsi, Turkish, and Zapotec—whose speakers use metaphors of spatial dimension to talk about sound. All three refer to high frequency sounds as “thin” and low frequency sounds as “thick”. While it may be possible to explain similar patterns of Farsi and Turkish due to the extensive history of language contact in central Asia, our inclusion of the out-of-contact Meso-American language Zapotec suggests more is going on regarding the natural iconicity between dimensions of size and the perception of sounds. We discuss how vocabulary that discretely break up continua of size dimensions lend themselves to less-tangible sound continua like pitch, loudness, and tempo. Thin always entails a comparison with thick, like high entails a comparison with low. An iconic relationship is set up between dimension and sound, which are domains that are both ontologically continuous but made phenomenologically discontinuous through their categorical representation in language.