The ancient Greeks had no word for ‘blue’. But the fact that they did not see this color seems a strange conclusion with that beautiful azure sea all around, with the cornflowers from their country and the bright blue sky above. What did Homer actually envision when he described the ‘wine-dark sea’? And how the English suffered a sunset for the word orange appeared in their language in the fifteenth century?
Many philosophers have considered the difference between what we observe and how we find the right words for it. That seems like an abstract issue, but anyone who makes a dictionary or encyclopedia always encounters it head on. In True Color Kory Stamper outlines how the three major editions of Webster’s (1909, 1934 and 1961) struggled with defining and naming color.
In terms of reputation, the Webster is the American counterpart Encyclopaedia Brittanicaan almost undisputed authority until the advent of the internet and Wikipedia. It is one thick, densely printed volume, more than a dictionary and less than an encyclopedia. Each entry in the restrainedly illustrated standard work therefore requires an insane amount of thought to find the right balance between depth, scientific precision, brevity and accessibility for a large audience. And Kory Stamper reports on that thinking, discussions, misunderstandings and often dramatic personal histories based on one theme: color.
Stamper herself worked as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster for thirty years and during the revision of the W3, as the third edition is called in the company, her ‘love affair’ with color began. Color is difficult to describe exactly. And in the Webster, according to Stamper, accuracy is paramount: the loose eighteenth-century style of Dr. Samuel Johnson can’t afford it anymore. Johnson, for example, defined “oats” as “a grain usually given to horses in England, but on which man lives in Scotland.”
How yellow can the margarine be?
Like many things, color quickly becomes more complicated the more you dig into it. During the First World War, the warring parties conducted extensive research into color for the precise camouflage of uniforms, vehicles and ships: the right color became of vital importance here. But what was ‘right’? After the successful introduction of margarine in 1870, a discussion broke out about exactly how yellow it could be in the tough competition with butter. It was fought all the way to the American Congress and then you have to know exactly what you mean by ‘yellow’.
Because color works on our subconscious, it became a leading tool to influence consumers, whether it was food, clothing, toys, kitchenware, gardening, home furnishings or cars. There was therefore an increasing need for color standardization in design and production in the industry.
That ambition was obviously on the minds of the editors of Webster. But how complicated something as simple as color turns out to be! Chemists dealt with pigments, physicists with refractive indices, aesthetes with art history, psychologists with the effects of color on the mind, marketing specialists and lexicographers with naming. Color has all kinds of shades and emotional values, there is a difference between dark, intense and deep blue, between dull, matte, soft, pale and weak, between light and bright, shiny, tingling and radiant. And does everyone see the same color? How do you know?
The book ignores the last, more philosophical questions. Wittgenstein is never mentioned, nor is the psychological, subjective experience of color as it has been since Goethes Color theory is often discussed, Stamper ignores. She is a passionate lexicographer and in her search for the correct standard classification of colours, she discusses the birth of three generations of dictionaries in just as much detail as the way in which color came to be in them.
How do you describe lilac?
In order to arrive at a good and workable classification of colors, Webster always fought a battle between scientific systematics and what was understandable to ordinary people; between hired specialists and those who had to create and sell the book. Could you come up with a description of lilac as a light grayish red? Or would you prefer, less responsibly, pink-purple with a reference to lilacs? The biggest problem was that the Webster wanted to be completely consistent.
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As the publication date approached, Merriam-Webster publishing became a pressure cooker with overworked teams, layoffs, improvisations and barely manageable conflicts. Shortly before the publication of the 1934 Webster, the passionate editor Paul Carhart took his own life. Another protagonist in this story, Edward Oakes, confined to a wheelchair by polio, did not retire and the hero of this color history, the indispensable, versatile IH Godlove, worked undisturbed on color descriptions in his hospital bed and died in 1954, seven years before the publication of W3.
Many of his results were driven by the work of his wife, the chemist Margaret Moss, who had to stop working when she married. At one point, Godlove suggested to Merriam-Webster that she might be able to get paid as a “stenographer.” Kory Stamper delves into the archives to discover how much scientific work Margaret did for her husband. And then she also wrote under his name the newsletter of the umbrella color authority ISCC-NBS, the national institute that established color. With which this book erects a small monument for all the work of married women from the last century that has been erased by history.
In 1955, only 54 percent of the W3 was completed. The following year, sixteen editors resign, all efforts for a thoroughly revised, clear classification of color seem to end in failure, those involved fear, in patchwork, in ‘a rainbow of gray’. The author leaves it open whether it actually got that bad.
When the third edition was finally published, the criticism was that this dictionary was too descriptive instead of prescribing correct language. Was it even up to the Webster to provide a definition of everyday colloquialisms, expressions like ‘ain’t’? Such a reflection goes to the heart of the discussions about color. Because you describe what we see say to see, or do you try to incorporate what we observe into a coherent, scientifically sound system?
