June 12, 2008

Coloring my opinion

Sure, color does make up a big part of our world, so it's probably important enough for an encyclopedia article, but Wikipedia's entry on colors links to a list of colors which just proves yet again that Wikipedia is either the most impressive collection of knowledge our species has ever gathered or a giant mess of minutia that has so much crap as to be effectively useless.

Sure, there are the pretty standard colors like red, blue, and green - even those aren't exactly without debate - but then we get into the slightly less well-known colors like...
  • Davy's Grey - which is described as being a greeny grey colour
  • amaranth - a reddish-rose color that is a representation of the color of the flower of the amaranth plant
  • carmine - a particularly deep red color that apparently has seven different named sub-carmines
  • tennĂ© - a "stain", a rarely used tincture, an orangish brown colour
  • zinnwaldite - a color that resembles the mineral zinnwaldite
  • gamboge - a rather transparent dark mustard yellow pigment
  • cosmic latte - the name assigned to the color of the universe, given by a team of astronomers
  • cerise - a deep to vivid purplish red
I'll admit that I guess it makes sense to have some names a little more individual than just "a deep to vivid purplish red". And if we have the names, we might as well compile them somewhere, and I guess Wikipedia is about as good a place as any for it.

Plus they also have a list of every Crayola crayon color ever.

Image courtesy of BombaCarta.

4 comments:

ReJEcht said...

If you want to see a list of pointless colors, just grab a handful of paintchips. They pay people to come up with these stupid names.

cmorin said...

Your comment about the internet being a collection of useless minutia reminded me of an article in the July/August issue if The Atlantic that asked the question, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Its a pretty awesome article.

calencoriel said...

I wonder if Eddie Vedder knows that the Crayola company retired "lemon yellow?"

PHSChemGuy said...

Mr Echt...I once saw a stdy showing that the letter that seemed to determine the sales of a paint color was p. More p's meant a better selling color.

Clearly important information.

As long as they keep "yellow leadbetter" in, Calen, we're all good.

I'll check the article, Craig.