A Curious Little Blog

Yellow has never seemed like much of a colour to me. It's more like off-white than a separate colour. I want to describe it as a dark white, but at the same time as a bright white. Are dark and bright opposites? I don't think so, because light blue is not bright; but I'm not really sure what bright means, unless it's perhaps "reflective." This brings me to the question of what distinguishes yellow from gold (and grey from silver). I remembering wondering about this when I was a kid, because Crayola's 64-pack had separate colours for yellow and gold, but I couldn't figure out what mixture of paints would reproduce gold. The trick, I realized, was that gold-coloured crayons had a sparkly element in them that clearly distinguished them from yellow; ditto for silver vs. grey. In practice, gold seems to be a little darker than pure yellow, but that doesn't stop people from describing blond hair as "golden." Yellow is one of the three pr...

Are red, yellow, and orange really "warm" colours? I remember learning about warm vs. cold colours in 1st grade, and I had absolutely no idea what the concept meant. The first thing that came to my mind was that blue must be a warm colour, since blue was my favourite colour. You can argue that yellow is warm because it is the colour of the sun and red because things turn "red-hot," but there are serious limitations to this claim. Fire is yellow, but it is also blue; items that get hotter than red-hot turn white-hot. Water and ice are commonly associated with blue and green, but they are really clear, and only appear in colour in certain circumstances. Maybe red, yellow, and orange share some common characteristic that we have arbitrarily designated "warmth," but I don't think it has anything to do with temperature. Green is generally seen as a cool colour, even though it is a mixture of a warm and cool pigments. What is purple? I'm not su...

I maintain a list of vocabulary words that I would like to learn. Among the hardest are words for colours, which are almost impossible to define in words. Sure, you can write "a dark grayish-brown," but will someone really be able to picture it in his mind? Among my words are three shades of brown: fuscous, taupe (rhymes with "rope") and filemot (fill-mott). Fuscous and taupe both mean "brownish-grey," which gives them the distinction of combining the two most boring colours. If it came down to it, I think I would choose brown as even more boring than grey. It's the colour of dirt, after all, not to mention other natural substances like wood and, frequently, fur. It's also the colour you get when you mix all the other colours together. According to wikipedia , it's actually a mixture of red, orange, or yellow with black, but that's not the way I remember it when I played with fingerpaints, and it's not the colour my kids get when th...

Have you ever wondered why we have a separate name for light red -- pink -- but no commonly used separate names for other light colours? Baby blue is as different from navy as pink is from red, but we can only identify it by adding a modifier to "blue"; it doesn't get its own word. "Pretty in Pink" makes a nice title, but "Pretty in Light Red" would never do. The same goes for light green, light purple, and other colours -- yellow, too, I suppose, although it's hard to think of yellow as being anything other than light. One could speculate that we use pink in a lot of common contexts -- flowers, lips, sometimes even skin colour, and it is the archetypal colour for girls -- but I don't know if that is adequate. I've also wondered why green seems so different from the colours that form it. When I see purple, it looks red and blue to me; when I see orange, it looks red and yellow. But when I see green, it doesn't look at all blue or ...