By Paula LaRocque, KERA 90.1 commentator.
Dallas, TX – What happened to the colors we knew as children? You remember those good old hues, the ones we first learned to recognize from our crayon box. There were the standard colors, of course - red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and violet. Or in the larger boxes, we could find fuschia, citron, and aqua. That's how we found out what "earth colors" were: terra cotta, ochre, burnt sienna. There were the colors good enough to eat: lemon, lime, peach, melon, strawberry, cherry, tangerine. And there was the spice and condiment color cupboard: cinnamon, paprika, sage, mustard.
Those associations were easy, even for children, and the colors easy to identify. But now! Imaginative marketing means coming up with creative new color names. And that's fine, but frequently you can't tell what those new colors are.
Here's a clothing catalog, for example, that shows the following colors: Cambridge, Vatican, Amazon, Apache, yarn, dune, safari, tile, twilight, pollen. And here's a good one - mist. What color is mist? For that matter, what color is an Amazon, an Apache, a safari, or yarn or tile?
But wait! Here's an even better color: Confetti! Excuse me? If I were five, I'd be tearing my hair.
By this catalog, at least, yarn is orange and tile is blue. Both safari and Amazon are olive. Pollen is ? would you guess yellow-orange? You'd be right. Dune is sandy beige. Sure. And twilight is purple. By Jove, I think we've got it.
Some of these fanciful color names are fun to guess at. But Cambridge and Vatican? What would we guess? Cambridge is blue and Vatican is violet. Who knew? And confetti? Confetti is white. Really?
The color-naming game is nothing new. Our crayon boxes once held a rosy-beige called "flesh."
That comes to mind, too, going through the mail. Here are ads for cosmetics and nylon stockings. This face powder comes in three shades: alabaster, creamy ivory, and misty pearl. And the pale beige stockings are called "nude."
Maybe all color-namers could take a cue from the catalog folks. With a little more effort, they might imagine that flesh and nudes come in more colors than alabaster, ivory, pearl, and beige.
Well, maybe not Cambridge or Vatican. Or confetti. But you know what I mean.
Paula LaRocque was The Dallas Morning News writing coach for twenty years. She now writes a column on language and communication for that newspaper.