greerwatson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
greerwatson) wrote2020-07-13 02:40 am
greerwatson) wrote2020-07-13 02:40 am
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Sunshine Challenge 2020 - Prompt 4 (Green) - Take 2
As someone who likes green, I look at it in comparison with other colours, and I think it gets sadly short-changed. I mean, just consider this:
YELLOW | YELLOW | ||
ORANGE | GREEN | ||
RED | GREEN | ||
BROWN | GREEN |
I mean, sure, we have names for the different greens. I'd call the lighter one "lime" and the muted one "olive". But they are still considered to be types of green. Suppose you had T-shirts striped like this:
The first one is striped in orange & yellow, the second in red & yellow, and the third in brown & yellow. However, as far as the others are concerned, if you were given any one of them on its own, you'd probably describe it as being green & yellow.
Of course, we do have names for specific shades of green: ivy green, spruce green, emerald green, spinach green and so on; but these are comparable to "canary yellow", "daffodil yellow", "sunshine yellow", and the like. The point is that lime is as different as orange, and olive as different as brown; but neither is considered to be a totally separate colour.
In fact, it gets more complicated when we look at colours that lie between lime (on the one hand) and orange (on the other hand) and pure yellow. Colours that are almost yellow.
You can run a sequence of interpolating these shades between yellow and either orange or (lime) green:
But if you compare them instead with red and its equivalent shade of green, they look practically yellow! (But not quite.)
When you look at them all together, you can see that they're the missing part of the sequence: you need these additional colours in order to get a proper gradation.
They don't have separate names, though. There really aren't enough names for colours.
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Color names are at their most frustrating when the marketing people get involved (so clothing catalogs and home decor). They'll outright mislabel things or give them entirely unhelpful names like (this is an actual example of a paint chip in a hardware store) "Miami Sunset". I honestly don't even remember what color that was; I just remember being annoyed by it. Orange? Yellow? Pink?
Artist's paints are pretty consistently labeled at least. (So you can order a tube of "sap green" without even looking at a sample and be pretty confident of what you'll get) Of course, that still doesn't give you all the colors, because artist's paints are meant to be mixed. Many brands don't even sell many shades of green, since green can be created so easily with yellow and blue. (Look at how many different shades of yellow or blue you can buy of these paints and how few shades of green are for sale: Winsor Newton color chart)
I always find it fascinating that people recognize "pink" as a distinct color from "red" but cannot make a distinction between a pastel pea green and a deep forest green. I think it really just comes down to the words. (I'm honestly dreading the blue-vs-indigo debate that's about to rage.)
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Also, monitors need to be adjusted so that white is white and flesh tones look right. Otherwise, one of the RGB components will dominate.
And there's the possibility that the computer is set to treat the old "safe" hexcodes differently from the rest. Darker, to be precise. Once upon a time, screens showed colours differently from the way they do now. The assumption is that the use of a safe hexcode means it's an old webpage.
No doubt there could be yet more contributing factors. I'm no computer expert.
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There've apparently been studies done that show that if your vocabulary doesn't have the words, you have difficulty analysing the colours as separate. A question of organizing the data, I suppose.
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Green weakness I think is the most common manifestation of Not Quite Colorblind, though I've mostly caught men being convinced that lighter tones of purple were blue.
There is of course chartreuse. And the Green Fairy of absinthe.
Turquoise is easier to talk about having a name, which distinguishes it from lapis.
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Do you mean this? I knew that the flowers called "pinks" were so named because of their pinked (i.e. fringed) edges—making their name a derivative of a verb that I'm familiar with from the context of sewing. However, I'd no idea that the colour of the flowers is the reason we call the hue "pink".
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And, Japanese gained a version of the word for pink from the Dutch, and also use the word white in their construction for a Western-styled dress shirt. Such that pinkwhiteshirt is a gloss for something that exists but Why Words!
Sweet William, which is another dianthus, is quite a bit more strongly hued than carnations (I'm not up on all the subtleties of how what was how when) and their pinking is even more noticeable with being flatter flowers.
But yeah, this is how English sloshes along.
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Well, as you're a mod for the Sunshine Challenge, I guess you know how the spectrum is being sliced. Giving you fair warning....
I'm planning on making at least two posts next time: one for "turquoise" and one for "blue". As for indigo (which to me is only a shade between blue and purple): I'll have a few words to say when it gets its turn.
You know, if Newton really did mean "blue" to mean a lighter colour closer to turquoise than blue, and then dragged in "indigo" because he needed a word for the darker colour, then his use of colour terms was closer to Russian or Japanese than modern English. At any rate, I've had a run-in or two with those who don't consider "turquoise" to be a basic colour. (Tune in next time for the thrilling details.)
Like Newton, I've sometimes felt compelled to drag in a few novel colour terms in order to label distinctions. For instance, I'll often use "gold" to refer to the golden-orange shades in the last diagram; and "chartreuse" to refer to the golden-greens. However, I'm reasonably certain that other people who use the latter term don't necessarily apply it to the same shade of green. (Oh, just wait till we get to "violet"!)
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"Blue" is a broad term that I think most people will consider contains everything from turquoise to indigo. When you define the rainbow with the traditional 7-label split then you end up calling turquoise "blue" but, personally, when I hear "blue" I'm picturing something closer to indigo. So it's all very muddled in my head. I'll blame Newton, I guess. (I lean more towards indigo dye being the color of indigo, but… indigo flowers edge into purple.)
My biggest pet peeve is when people mix up chartreuse and puce. (If you do a google image search for "puce", there are inevitably a handful of chartreuse things mixed in because so many people mix up the names despite the colors being nothing alike.)
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Same here.
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It's been a long while since I've read Berlin & Kay; but, as I recall they asked native speakers to segment a colour array using their language's basic colour terms. Thus a broad range of hues identifiable with that term could be identified. Subjects were also asked to point out the foci for each basic colour. Berlin and Kay found that, cross-linguistically, the foci for colours like red, yellow, green, etc. were fairly consistent, though the range of colours so identified varied enormously. Essentially, the more colour terms your language has, the more tightly you draw the boundaries; but you'll always put the central colour (e.g. the ideal red, the perfect example of blue, etc.) in much the same place.
My recollection is that, when plotting English colour terms, they wound up with a a big gap where true turquoise shades would be. Then again, they didn't consider "turquoise" a basic colour term; so their subjects would not have been allowed to identify colour chips as turquoise.
Without having the book in front of me, I can't tell you what their test subjects picked as focal blue. And, as I recall, they told readers up front that the printing process made the picture of the colour array inaccurate anyway; so that doesn't help much!
When we do the next colour, I'll be sure to do my best to show focal blue and turquoise for me. But it'll be by what I see on my monitor; so there's no saying how you'll see it. :(
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Hrmph. Poor planning on their part. I'd probably call it "cyan" instead of turquoise because when I think of colors, I'm more likely to think of paint or ink. I tend to think of "turquoise" mainly as the stone.
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Well, to me, those terms mean something along these lines:
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:-)
Interestingly, if you google "chartreuse" you won't see examples of puce. The error only seems to work the other way around. (I'm vaguely curious about what the alcohol chartreuse tastes like, but not enough to go out and actually buy some.)