Nature's Palette

Having the names for things can make us pay more attention to detail

Free Image from PixaBay. Can you name the colors here? Pinkish is not a color.

My vocabulary of color is depauperate. I lack the names for the gradations that spread out beneath the primary colors, whose names we learn in kindergarten.

Of course, colors don't come with names. Were it not for language--and a collective agreement to assign different nuanced frequencies of light by different creative names we more or less agree upon--the concept of color could not be expressed in the cosmos as all.

But we have the gift of words, and a keen need to share the beauty we see in colors of the world--and especially the natural world--in sunsets and sand, tree bark and a flicker’s plumage; in the first light of morning; and in your children’s eyes. Poets, painters and pilgrims go to great pains to consider and sometimes speak of color in their world with more eloquence than the rest of us, who live as verbal weaklings in ROYGBIV.

And somehow, that attention to detail and language as I read about this centuries-old field guide to color makes me hope that our species survives. We do care--the best of us--and maybe we deserve to reach the other side of the coming bottleneck of history.

Meanwhile, I think I will order the updated _Werner's Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Minerology, Anatomy, and the Arts_ for $13.75 from Smithsonian Books. Having the names for things (even colors) makes us aware of the details, makes us pay more attention, and that's never a bad thing.