{"id":7475,"date":"2018-09-12T07:16:17","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T11:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7475"},"modified":"2018-09-12T07:16:17","modified_gmt":"2018-09-12T11:16:17","slug":"name-that-color","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7475","title":{"rendered":"Name That Color"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dress\"Author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan asks an intriguing question about perception in her recent Catapult<\/em> article, \u201cIs the Green You See, the Green I See?\u201d The answer to that one is \u201cprobably not,\u201d given the 2015 social media uproar over \u00a0the question \u201cwhat color is this dress<\/a>?\u201d The controversy generated some 10 million tweets, as people variously perceived a washed-out photo of a horizontally striped dress as white with gold lace or, as it really was, blue with black lace. (For the record, I\u2019m a white-and-gold gal).<\/p>\n

Buchanan, author of the novel Harmless Like You<\/em>, describes the challenge of finding the precise term to describe a color, because it makes a great deal of difference whether a \u201cred dress\u201d is described as scarlet (suggesting something about the wearer) or the maroon of dried blood (suggesting something else entirely). My writing coach loves the example of an old, decaying house with shutters of \u201cfungal green.\u201d \u201cFungal\u201d not only describes the shade of green much more exactly (I see lichen) but conveys something important about the house itself.<\/p>\n

In my short story set during the Revolutionary War, an eight-year-old boy sees a frightened woman \u201cgo white.\u201d But how to describe that in terms a boy of that age, education, and era would use? \u201cWhite as chalk\u201d is a clich\u00e9, \u201cwhite as paper\u201d was possibly anachronistic, parchment being ivory. I settled on \u201cwhite as milk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buchanan\u2019s quest for color enlightenment led her to Sanzo Wada\u2019s A Dictionary of Color Combinations<\/em> from the 1930s, which describes hues in charmingly evocative Japanese and English. Ivory Buff in English is White Tea in Japanese. Grenadine Pink is Washed Red. And my favorite of her examples, Light Brown Drab is Plum Mouse.<\/p>\n

Ballard consulted several other color classification books too, including Werner\u2019s Nomenclature of Colours<\/em> (1821) which, she says, \u201choped to bring together science and art.\u201d Out in a new facsimile edition, the publisher calls it “a charming artifact from the golden age of natural history and global exploration.” Darwin took it with him to the Galapagos.<\/p>\n

In Werner’s<\/em>, each color was given an animal, mineral, and vegetative reference. For example, Prussian Blue (one of my favorite colors) was specified as \u201cThe Beauty Spot on Wing of Mallard Drake,\u201d \u201cStamen of Bluish Purple Anemone\u201d (vague in itself), and \u201cBlue Copper Ore,\u201d in case you have any of that lying around. However, it does widen the field of people who can appreciate this blackish-blue color<\/a>, which included the folks outfitting the Prussian Army and Vincent Van Gogh. He used it predominantly, along with other blues, when painting his \u201cStarry Night.\u201d Philip Kerr\u2019s excellent thriller Prussian Blue<\/em> was not referring to color, but to the compound\u2019s use as an antidote to heavy metal poisoning. What a truckload of associations!<\/p>\n

Tomorrow\u2019s Post: \u201cColor is More Than a Shade\u201d talks about why these allusive color descriptors are important.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan asks an intriguing question about perception in her recent Catapult article, \u201cIs the Green You See, the Green I See?\u201d The answer to that one is \u201cprobably not,\u201d given the 2015 social media uproar over \u00a0the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Name That Color - \"OMG, is that dress Plum Mouse?\" Describing colors precisely.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,5,185,51,29],"tags":[297,166,28],"class_list":["post-7475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-imagination","category-language","category-words","category-writing","tag-color","tag-creativity","tag-writers"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Wz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7477,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475\/revisions\/7477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}