Crayola Crayon geek here, I have documentation of all color names used by Crayola. Right now it’s at a bit over 720. I have actual crayons in all but about 20 of the known color names. A crayon name purple and did not include violet too was used in the early days of the Crayola line. The Crayon Collectingwebsite show the name purple was not used as a primary crayon color between 1914 and 1990, it was only used in Mexico after 1990. The only Crayola crayon I have that is purple without the violet is from a set of crayons from about 1910. My 1903 set of crayons just has a violet without the purple in parentheses. There is also a crayon color named “The Color Purple”, Oprah Winfrey was given a box of crayons with that special moniker. Each guest in her audience that day was give an 8 pack that that crayon replacing the violet crayon. But alas, it is not violet or purple, it is the same color as the violet-blue crayon. That box of crayons cost me $400, I consider worth every penny.
I forget my footnote:
*Even though Newton didn’t believe the Wave Theory of Light, he did associate a certain characteristic length with each color. He obtained these from his measurements and calculations for the phenomenon we call “Newton’s Rings” (This phenomenon might also have suggested the analogy between colors and musical tones, as well – The colors repeat in different “octaves” after one another, just as the notes in a scale do, for instance, on a piano keyboard). The gap between the lower plane glass surface and the upper spherical glass surface has a certain size, and red re-appeared when this gap distance was a multiple of its first appearance.
To me, that characteristic length would be strong evidence to re-examine my stand on light being a wave phenomenon, because it strongly suggests “wavelength”. But Newton’s convictions were stronger than mine, I guess.
I, too, would vote for cyan. It’s established in printing media so it’s not an unknown color, and I feel that it is distinct from “blue” and “green”. However, as one person mentioned, light blues start to get pretty iffy in that spectrum and a light cyan may not seem very distinct from a blue.
I have always understood violet to denote a color using close or exactly 50% red and 50% blue. Purple, on the other hand, could be any mix of the two and usually falls a little more on the blue side. There is something back in my memory with a teacher saying to the class, “Now, if you ask for violet at the paint store, you’ll always get a 50/50 mix. But if you ask for purple you could get anything”
Good discussion and thanks for all you are discussing Cal. Ignorance fought.
Now I know that Crayola collecting is a thing. How on earth did a crayon survive since 1903 with so many small children and blank walls in the world?
I’d probably vote for magenta ahead of a lot of things; it at least is a reasonably well known word and has a clear definition.
So my memory played me false. Well, as I said, it’s forty years out-of-date.
Collecting Crayola crayons, eh? That’s…really really cool. I bet your house smells wonderful.
But how often do you run into something magenta? And besides, if we’re already counting pink, that’ll have you covered in a pinch. Cyan is more useful.
Edit: Plus, cyan is a spectral color. Magenta is only in your mind.
How about salmon? It’s not really pink and it’s not really orange.
The Master’s column is titled “Could early man only see three colors?” It may be amusing to look at Calvin and Hobbes’ take on this issue.
I, myself, find myself using “teal” often. It’s not readily visible in a spectrum, but teal occupies a significant patch of one basic linguistic-research color chart.
Then we need to add magenta as a basic color word as it’s equally important in four-color process printing. At least we already have yellow and black.
But, aside from an anthropological curiosity, what’s the purpose of trying to pin down only a dozen or so “basic” colors?
Exactly right.
Done! And puce too, while we’re at it.
For some reason I just never got a good feeling for what shades aqua represents. Perhaps it’s because I learned aqua means “water” in Latin, and that confused me. I’ll take your word that that’s what people mean.
I was going by what I read on the interwebs about Italian having a word for light blue. Sounds like that’s the word they meant and it includes some shades that are not exacty light blue. There’s nothing wrong with that; a 12th color word will not necessarily correspond to just being a {light|dark}{orther color}.
Yes, but does it immediately roll off the tongue if you have to describe a light blue object? It sure doesn’t for me. And that’s pretty much the definition of a basic color word.
I agree on the yellow-green. That’s why I suggested lime in the OP, short for lime-green. And you see it all the time. Visibility vests worn by utility/road workers and many bicyclists’ jackets are lime. Chartreuse would work too, but if it’s going to be a basic color word, we’ll have to settle on just one of them.
I always think of teal as being a brilliant blue-green, pretty much exactly the shade of the duck, but not just any shade of blue-green. (The green teal duck, that is; there are other teal ducks that don’t have that color.) I learned turquoise as a color before I found out it was a mineral, so I tend to think of it as just any blue-green. So my thinking on these two are influenced by how I learned about them. YMMV.
You can also find the words bleen and grue used for blue-green. Doubt if they’ll ever catch on.
I would have thought it was the other way around, with violet being bluer since violets are bluer:
Well, how about sky? It’s short, basic, and, like orange, violet and lime, has a physical referent.
As to grue and bleen, I don’t think they’re “real” color words - I’ve only encountered them in a thought experiment that described a logical paradox. Grue, IIRC, was the color of a stone that was green until midnight on December 31, 1999, and blue thereafter. Bleen was the opposite.
Yes, that might work. Or perhaps powder. But note that having a physical referent is a not a requirement for a basic color word. In fact, if it has one (as orange and pink do), it has to be shown that it’s “outgrown” the referent.
Hadn’t run across that one before. But you can find other uses of them on the infobahn.
How about we just merge them into gruebleen for that color…
Powder suggests white, to me. As in, baking powder, or Bolivian Marching Powder, or “Twelve inches of fresh powder at Telluride! Grab your snowboard, dude!”
Good point. I was thinking of powder blue, but without the “blue” part of it, it gets a different connotation. So scratch that one.
Another vote for cyan. It’s as good a word as any for a light, brilliant blue.
Magenta a close second, but with purple/violet and pink already on the table, I’d rather cyan make the grade.
gold and silver?