Naming Shades and Tints of Colors

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ed from Ithaca, New York.

Hey, Ed, welcome.

What’s up?

Boy, I had such a long list of things, but I think what I’ll focus on is color. It kind of comes from a pet peeve of my dad’s about what are the primary colors. And if I asked you, what would you say? Red, blue, yellow?

Red, blue, yellow.

Well, it actually varies. If we’re talking about light or we’re talking about pigments with light, it’s actually red, blue, and green. And in pigments, it’s magenta, cyan, and yellow.

My dad’s theory is it doesn’t matter if you know it correctly or not, even if you’re teaching it. It doesn’t really matter if you’re teaching it correctly or not, because the only people who it matters to are artists, photographers, people in the print profession. Otherwise, it’s, you know, colors are just such a random thing. I mean, different cultures have different names for different colors. Some don’t even have names for things that we would consider a color. Just look at paint chips. My golly, those are just, you know, somebody makes it up. I want that job.

Yeah.

What do you think about the fact that colors seem to be so random and that when scientists actually agree on what they are, it doesn’t matter that people don’t know them and that there is no agency, you know, an international committee that says, okay, these are the names of colors, so we’re not miscommunicating? Because we do that for so many other things. We have standards, we name things, but not colors.

That’s actually right. We define colors in a scientific sense by their hertz, by the frequency of the color, the light frequency. But we don’t do it by name because they are so variable because red, as you say, in one language isn’t maybe the same as red in another. And some languages might not have, for example, the color orange indicated or a language like Russian might have two different colors for blue, two different words for blue.

It’s really interesting, and there’s so much work has been done on this. The famous study, of course, is from the 1960s. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay did a study that found that generally, if a language had only two color terms, they were almost always black and white. And if there was one more color term, then it was going to be red. And the fourth and fifth were probably going to be green and yellow in either order. And the next was probably blue, and the next was probably brown, and so on.

It’s just so interesting that humans, no matter where they are, tend to create color names in approximately the same order. Another study that was done by Ted Gibson and Bevel Conway, they studied 110 languages and found that people are much better at telling other people about warm colors, that is the reds and the oranges and the yellows, than they are the cool colors like the blues and greens. And this is because we’re more attuned to the reds and oranges and yellows. So I could better convey to you, say, a magenta or a burnt sienna than I could say an ocean blue.

And colors can go with emotions too.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s another way of categorizing that. And they’re not the same. And then the cultural attachment of color is like white doesn’t mean the same thing in every culture. Black doesn’t mean the same thing in every culture. Or purple or red. This is almost philosophical. We need a way with philosophy because this is almost more than language. It’s almost about the basic level of humanity. The fact that we even perceive our world through light and say not exclusively through touch or sound or taste.

This is so good. I don’t have them at my fingertips right now, but there are a number of books that we’ve recommended over the years about colors and color names. And I think we’ll attach them to the show notes for this episode just to give them another good airing because there’s so much more to this than language. There’s something right at the essence of humanity, what it means to be human. To talk about color and to perceive color and to have this really personal relationship to it. Even that very childish impulse to have a favorite color.

It’s true. I never thought of that. Ed, thank you so much for launching us off into this. I think this is a dinner conversation waiting to happen across America.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your insight and I look forward to seeing those notes.

Bye-bye.

Great. Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye now.

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