3529 Color confusion

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

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I read an article about color.  Did you know that there are many primitive peoples who have only a few names for color?  There are cultures in VietNam who use the same word for blue and green.  They consider leaves and sky to be literally the same color group, just different shades.

There are Pacific Islanders who describe all colors as either white or black (everything is divided into light or dark).  If you show them a color and ask what color it is, you get "light" or "dark".  That's the only differentiation.  Other light-dark tribes have added a name for red, so everything is light, dark, or red.  Light green and yellow are in the white group, dark green and purple are in the black group, and then there's red.

I personally have difficulty with the Euro-American classifications of the violet/purple group of colors.  When someone describes something as "purple", I have NO mental image of what color they mean.

In the Wikipedia entry on purple, I don't see Tyrian purple as purple at all.  I see it as reddish brown or "old blood".  I'd definitely put it in the red group, not the purple.  And it's interesting that Tyrian purple was the first purple dye, from shellfish.

"The color heliotrope is a brilliant tone of purple".  Sorry.  I see that as a pink.  I also see "red-violet" as a shade of pink.

I often see colors that I have no idea what to call them, and that's almost always in what others consider the purple group.  To me, they look like some shade of pink or blue.

I guess I draw my dividing line between red and purple, and between blue and purple, a lot closer to the purple side than most people do.  My "purple group" is very small.

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Note - before anyone tells me my monitor needs adjusting, I can assure you it doesn't.  I buy enough fabric, notions, yarns, and clothing online that I frequently ensure that my monitor is carefully calibrated against a hardcopy color card.   Besides, I'm not just talking about screen colors.  It's in real life, too.  Jay would come in the house and say something about "those little purple flowers in the side yard", and I'd have no idea what he was talking about, so he'd take me out and show me, and I'd say "They're not purple!  They're clearly obviously BLUE!  (...or PINK!)" and we'd be off on the same old discussion again.
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