…have seams. An interesting look at how different cultures deal with naming colors.
17 thoughts on “Rainbows”
Thing is, everything we do with concepts is about slicing and dicing an analog world into easily understood and communicated bits, digital-style. The Genesis story about Adam naming the animals is far from the earliest example; it’s a fundamental feature of how our brains work since we developed the capacity for language.
Crayons didn’t mess with our brains — they are an exemplary expression of our humanity.
This is why religion and politics use words to control followers.
If you don’t have a word for it; it doesn’t exist (can’t be perceived.)
This is one of the things that makes Marxism so evil. They redefine dynamic growing people into static classes. Class warfare is then more of a problem because it works to the limited perception of the useful idiots.
The same thing has been happening with public vs. private. Private is being defined away into public (green and blue are merging back into one color.)
This works to the statist’s purpose to control everything (because it’s now all public. There is no private.)
One of the blogs I scan regularly is about “public health.” However, they also post a lot on Obamacare in that very context. Of course, Obamacare is about private health — you know, all that Roe v. Wade bit which turned-out to be complete bullshit once the progs got their eyes on our wallets. Anyway, if leftists were capable of logical thought, I’d ask them, but it would just get deleted like all other disenting inquiries.
That looks similar to language’s relation to numbers, where the initial thought was that members of primitive tribes whose language’s numeric vocabulary is quite limited (“one, two, three, many”) couldn’t distinguish sets containing a half-dozen items, even when they were taught words for the higher numbers. It turned out the problem wasn’t the language, it was the lack of counting games and rituals which associate the number word with the number of items in a sequential fashion, like reciting the alphabet in order.
We lack exactly such a ritual for colors, except perhaps for electronics geeks learning the resistor color code, and even that hasn’t been put into a song. We should start at 760 nm and sing our way to 450 nm in 10 nm increments, set to the tune of Johnny B. Goode or Oh, Pretty Woman.
That’s a bit simplistic–it only involves “pure” colors–light of only one frequency. We would really need light that stimulates the different cones differently.
Good point, so instead we start singing a low note for 760 nm, then move up the musical scale with the pitch following the spectrum and volume following the radiant intensity, with the color words thrown in every 10 nm as reference markers. Then when you’re in a paint store and your wife sings the scale for the color she wants in the kitchen, you could use an iPhone ap to translate it instead of guessing what burnt Brazilian eggshell cream is.
I had a friend who was an artist–not only did she have an astounding eye for color, she knew how that color would change between when a paint was wet and when it was dry. She had looked at another friend’s wall (yes, at one time I had more than one friend) and went to a paint store and directed the mixing of a matching color; supposedly it was impossible to tell where the old paint ended and the new paint began (but maybe the second friend was being nice about it).
Many moons ago I learned the colours of the rainbow with the mnemonic:
“Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.”
Indigo? Who thinks it’s a good idea to name a color after Indigofera? I never heard of Indigofera. Latin is a dead language for a reason.
They might name a kid Violet, but Indigo? You might paint your illegal alien truck that color (well, because In dego?) I know there are a lot of colors and coming up with names is hard… “Sam Francisco? I’ll just call ya George.”
But really, Indigo?
“My name is Indigo Montoya. You made fun of the name my father gave me. Prepare to cry.”
Thing is, everything we do with concepts is about slicing and dicing an analog world into easily understood and communicated bits, digital-style. The Genesis story about Adam naming the animals is far from the earliest example; it’s a fundamental feature of how our brains work since we developed the capacity for language.
Crayons didn’t mess with our brains — they are an exemplary expression of our humanity.
Yes, it’s called a schema.
This is why religion and politics use words to control followers.
If you don’t have a word for it; it doesn’t exist (can’t be perceived.)
This is one of the things that makes Marxism so evil. They redefine dynamic growing people into static classes. Class warfare is then more of a problem because it works to the limited perception of the useful idiots.
The same thing has been happening with public vs. private. Private is being defined away into public (green and blue are merging back into one color.)
This works to the statist’s purpose to control everything (because it’s now all public. There is no private.)
One of the blogs I scan regularly is about “public health.” However, they also post a lot on Obamacare in that very context. Of course, Obamacare is about private health — you know, all that Roe v. Wade bit which turned-out to be complete bullshit once the progs got their eyes on our wallets. Anyway, if leftists were capable of logical thought, I’d ask them, but it would just get deleted like all other disenting inquiries.
That looks similar to language’s relation to numbers, where the initial thought was that members of primitive tribes whose language’s numeric vocabulary is quite limited (“one, two, three, many”) couldn’t distinguish sets containing a half-dozen items, even when they were taught words for the higher numbers. It turned out the problem wasn’t the language, it was the lack of counting games and rituals which associate the number word with the number of items in a sequential fashion, like reciting the alphabet in order.
We lack exactly such a ritual for colors, except perhaps for electronics geeks learning the resistor color code, and even that hasn’t been put into a song. We should start at 760 nm and sing our way to 450 nm in 10 nm increments, set to the tune of Johnny B. Goode or Oh, Pretty Woman.
That’s a bit simplistic–it only involves “pure” colors–light of only one frequency. We would really need light that stimulates the different cones differently.
Good point, so instead we start singing a low note for 760 nm, then move up the musical scale with the pitch following the spectrum and volume following the radiant intensity, with the color words thrown in every 10 nm as reference markers. Then when you’re in a paint store and your wife sings the scale for the color she wants in the kitchen, you could use an iPhone ap to translate it instead of guessing what burnt Brazilian eggshell cream is.
I had a friend who was an artist–not only did she have an astounding eye for color, she knew how that color would change between when a paint was wet and when it was dry. She had looked at another friend’s wall (yes, at one time I had more than one friend) and went to a paint store and directed the mixing of a matching color; supposedly it was impossible to tell where the old paint ended and the new paint began (but maybe the second friend was being nice about it).
Many moons ago I learned the colours of the rainbow with the mnemonic:
“Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.”
Indigo? Who thinks it’s a good idea to name a color after Indigofera? I never heard of Indigofera. Latin is a dead language for a reason.
They might name a kid Violet, but Indigo? You might paint your illegal alien truck that color (well, because In dego?) I know there are a lot of colors and coming up with names is hard… “Sam Francisco? I’ll just call ya George.”
But really, Indigo?
“My name is Indigo Montoya. You made fun of the name my father gave me. Prepare to cry.”
You got sumptin against Polydactylytes?
You might not name a kid Indigo, but you might name a mood after it.
So…
Many
moonsmoods ago you learned…Didn’t Jenny McCarthy write a book about her Indigo child?
Here’s an interesting take on that.