True Color

The plain facts of English usage are that, by sheer volume, our main vocabularic interaction with color is through color names, not terms of color science or optics or chemistry. How often do you go into a paint store and ask for them to mix up samples by handing them a sheet of paper with trichromatic measurements and diffuse spectral reflectance ratios? “Never” is the correct answer, though I will also accept “what are you talking about?” No: Just as Priest and his nerds have their own vocabulary of color, we, too, have a general vocabulary of color. We tell the person behind the counter that we’re looking for neutrals (which are not colorimetrically neutral at all), or jewel tones (which include the colors of only some jewels and not others, like diamonds), or pastels (colors named after a type of fine-art crayon that can and does come in colors that are not pastel, sense 2); warm colors, cool colors, strong colors, soft colors. Or we go straight to the wall of paint chips and begin to collect a poker hand of Dark Evergreen, Muted Graphite, Negroni, Plantain Chip, Firecracker, Swiss Coffee, Secret.

Priest’s whine that color names are “weird and fanciful” is only half true. Many common color names do have a logic to them, but it’s a logic built on human experience and not some scientific nomenclature. There are four main types of color names. We’ve got the basic color categories—the first colors that we learn as toddlers, the main color buckets into which all other colors get dumped. Generally speaking, that’s red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, pink, gray, white, and black. Beyond the basic color terms, there are color names that some scholars call intrinsic. These are color names based on something in real life—plants, foods, gems, animals, earth. “Lime” is (supposedly) the color of limes; “daffodil” is the color of daffodil flowers; “burnt umber” is the color of a type of earth from Umbria (baked), and “raw sienna” is the color of a type of earth from Siena (raw); “cardinal” is the red of the bird; “mummy” is the brown of the pyramid denizen. “Based on” is loosely used here: Rarely do intrinsic color names exactly match every specimen of the thing they take their name from. Limes (neither rind nor flesh) are “lime”; daffodils span a range of yellows, whites, oranges, but only one of those colors is “daffodil.” Still, intrinsic color names are amazing: a testament to the observational powers of humankind, universal enough that the vast majority of a language’s speakers have a general idea of what broad color category an intrinsic color name sits inside, but specific to individual groups, places, times. Paul Green-Armytage, a color researcher from Australia, ran an experiment where he gave a number of English speakers (mostly students) from Australia, England, and the United States five minutes to write down all the single-word color names they could think of (so “blue” was fine, but “baby blue” was not). He got about 270 responses, tallied them, and ended up with a list of about 203 color names, which he sorted by different variables. You can cross-section an entire language’s speakers depending on their color names. Green- Armytage found, for instance, that only Americans listed “cranberry” as a color name, and only Australians listed “mulberry.” Your field of study or work plays a part: Architecture students named colors derived from built environments and materials (copper, granite, lead, oak); design students listed “magenta” and “cyan,” two colors used in printing; painters named “ocher,” “sienna,” “umber,” “vermilion,” all of which are the names of fine-art colors or pigments; the members of the West Australian Quilters Association named colors that came from fashion and textiles, like “beige,” “cerise,” “burgundy,” “aubergine” (or “eggplant,” if you’re a member of an American quilters’ guild).

Then we have associative color names. These are names that are usually tied to a person or a place, but there isn’t a one-to-one mental association between the thing named and the color. The Alice of “Alice blue,” the Althaea of “rose d’Althaea,” the Josephine of, well, “josephine”— which Alice/Althaea/Josephine comes to mind, and then, what color do you associate with them? “Josephine” evokes windswept romance, jackets and short pants, France—is it blue? Is it pink? Is it a gray? Or pick a basic color term and travel the world: Chinese blue, Prussian blue, Armenian blue, Olympian blue, Pompeiian blue, Milori blue, Venetian blue, up through Neuwied blue and Bremen blue, then over to Holland blue (but more specifically Leyden blue) and Antwerp blue, then down the coast through Brittany blue to Paris blue, hop the Channel for Oxford, Derby, Victoria, Cambridge, and Eton blues. How are all these blues different? Surprise: Some of them are greens.

And then we have the truly fanciful color names. These are color names that are meant to evoke a feeling, and they are highly contextual. I have, in my possession, a sales pamphlet for office cubicle walls—you know the ones, the standard-issue half walls that are covered with a burlap- esque plain-weave fabric and edged with aluminum binding—that gives color samples for all the fabrics you can get your office-drone-box covered in. The colors are all named things like Hush, Mute, Ambiance, Mellow, Muffle, Mystery, Secret, Placid. Are you asleep yet? How’s your resting heart rate? You are completely relaxed; when I snap my fingers, you will wake up, and you will increase productivity by 200 percent. If I ask you what colors these actually are, you will use the context in which you’ve encountered these names (office, cubicle, corporate, blah) and then draw from your various internal associations and feelings about these words. Cubicles are always gray, or beige, or taupe, or another neutral barely-there color, so you’ll pull up a mental range of tans and grays and start matching words based on that.

But those associations sometimes steer us wrong. “Mellow,” for instance, is the label on a bright, kindergartner-scream orange—certainly not a color I associate with the word “mellow.” “Secret” is practically electric blue, as if “practically” would make it a color that you’d put on an office wall. But which employer is going to buy cubicles in a color called Electric? All the fanciful names rely on a complex, individualized interaction between an object, a word, and a viewer—which makes them practically impossible to define in a general dictionary.

Not that dictionaries have done a great job even with the basic color categories or the intrinsic color names. Most monolingual English dictionaries didn’t even bother with most colors—even the dictionaries that are supposed to be exhaustive. The color names that tended to be defined were the ones used in literature—heraldry, or art criticism, or philosophy—and most often only if they were tied to a particular pigment or colorant. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary, considered a cornerstone of modern lexicography, enters the fruit “orange” but not the color— though the word had been used to describe one of the core colors since the sixteenth century. He defines “pink” as “a colour used by painters.” Which color, Sam? You know, one of the ones used by painters. Even the big dictionaripedias of the nineteenth century tended to enter color names only incidentally—mostly out of encyclopedic or etymological interest. The Century Dictionary notes that “Turkey red” is a color from a particular dyestuff (madder) and is really only of interest because it’s so named from being first produced in the Levant. More common color names were Johnsonian in their vagueness. “Puce” in the Century was defined as “of a flea-color,” which is only helpful if you have excellent vision and fleas.

But this sort of imprecision was not going to work if the Second was to be a scientifically informed dictionary. If Priest continued in his obstinacy to refuse to even look at the color names, how was Merriam supposed to rise above?