Living in the area around Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton (ABE, in airport parlance), one can’t help but be aware that Crayola is based in the E sector. We visited the Crayola Experience while still residents of New Jersey and if there’s any place that smells like childhood this was it. One of the truly interesting aspect of Crayola is that it defined specific shades of color. Or at least Crayola’s version of it. Many of us have pretty clear ideas about the basic six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Sure, they added “indigo” to make it into a pronounceable name, and changed purple to “violet” to give us the standard seven, but this illustrates the point that I’m making—colors are somewhat relative. Try to get anyone to describe, famously, puce (which I’ve learned is French for “fleas”).
A friend has recently been sharing stories from a book on the origins of color names (Secret Lives of Colors by Kassia St Clair), from which I learned about puce. Although I haven’t read the book myself, it has become clear that colors indicate different things to different people. All of this reminded me of a crisis I faced in my youth. One of my teachers in middle school, in physics class, mentioned that not all people perceived the same color in the same way. Or at least there’s no way to know whether they do or not. Perhaps, he suggested, everyone has the same favorite color, but what they call it is different. While the latter point seems unlikely, I took to heart that not everyone sees things the same way. The same dilemma came back to me as my friend showed me various colors and said that her idea of what that color name designated was something quite different.
As in much of what I write, there are metaphors and analogies active here. A paradox of religions is the great variety among them combined with the certainty that one’s own alone is “the truth.” And all religious believers tend to be certain that theirs is true. Like the color names we learn as children, we seldom grow up to question what we were told in our youth. Some religions appeal to adult converts, but most people stay close to the orthodoxies of their youth. Religions, like colors names, are a matter of consensus, for there are any number of shades and hues, and what we decide to name them is not revealed from on high. They do, however, give the world considerable color.
Steve A. Wiggins 