114: Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper

Introduction

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we're getting enthusiastic about colour and how we describe it with Corey Stamper. But first, our most recent bonus episode was all about

0:33idioms. We go the extra mile to get to the bottom of why we should cut idioms some slack. It's easier said than done. Go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm to get this and many other bonus episodes.

Corey Stamper Bio

0:57Corey Stamper is a lexicographer and was associate editor at Merrin-Webster for almost two decades. Her first book was Word by Word, The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Her second book is out 31st of March, 2026, and is titled True Colour, The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Colour, From Azure to Zinc Pink. Welcome, Corey. Thank you. It's good to be here with both of you. It's so lovely to have you here. And we're already off to a start where I'm like, you don't say Azure. We're doing so great. Corey, how did you get into lexicography?

1:35It was pretty much an accident. Back in my undergraduate, I was a medieval studies major, so I studied languages and literature primarily. And after I got out of college, I thought, well, now what am I gonna do? And I answered, this is how long ago it was, I answered a wantad. In the newspaper. Oh, yeah. Wow. In a print newspaper to be an editorial assistant at Merriam-Webster. I got the job and within a few

2:08months of being there, just realized this is what I, this is what I want to do. This is what I love doing. And that's how I got into lexicography. And I've been a lexicographer now since 1998.

Writing About Lexicography

2:22Whoa. And you also wrote a previous book about lexicography, Word by Word, which we also loved and reviewed in one of the very early episodes of Linkthusiasms. We will link to that from the archives. How did you get into writing about lexicography? You know, it was kind of an occupational hazard of working at a dictionary company. So Merriam-Webster, way back in the Dark Ages, used to respond to every single piece of consumer mail or email that came in. And most of them were asking, yeah, I don't think they do that anymore. So please,

2:55folks, don't email Merriam-Webster to ask them questions. I was one of the people that was in charge of answering a lot of that email. And there was that coupled with the fact that whenever I would go out or meet new people, they would say, what do you do? And I'd say, oh, I write dictionaries. People would say, what? How? Why? Who? When? You mean there are people behind those dictionaries? I thought you just appeared like from the seafoam, like Aphrodite. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Or why do we need to write dictionaries? They've already been written.

3:31So after a little bit of having these conversations with people over and over, I started a blog where I just started talking a little bit about what it's like to write dictionaries. Why do people write them? What are some of the weird parts of writing dictionaries? And the blog took off. People loved it. And that's what led to my first book. And that's led to this book, too.

Research Topic

3:55So if you can cast your mind all the way back, Corey, how did you get into the research topic for this book? Well, it really began as part of the work I was doing at Merriam-Webster. We were moving Webster's third New International Dictionary unabridged online. This was a book that was published in 1961. It had never been digitized. And part of my job was to go through and make sure that all of the text to HTML conversion went properly. So it was a boring slog that I am uniquely built for. I would open up a

4:37dictionary page and I would say, okay, I'm starting at Beaufort scale. And I'd go through, I'd read the whole entry in print. And then I would go online and make sure, okay, everything's there. The etymology has rendered correctly. All the special characters are there. That's really astounding because I can kind of comprehend that dictionaries get made. But I also just kind of assumed that the Webster's online that we now have also just manifest like someone just went clickety-click-click and then it was there. But this is a book that was printed in the

5:10age of physical print and before digital print files. So it was a big old manual job. And it's thanks to your diligence that it's up there.

Dictionary Errors

5:20Yeah. Yeah. And if there are errors, those are my fault. Someone else's fault.

5:27So I would go through and I would read through and read through. And it's very important to know that Webster's Third has a very particular defining style. It's very dry. It is very formulaic. It seems like it was created in a lab to put you to sleep immediately. Can you give me an example of a definition in this dry technical style? Absolutely. So this is the definition or one of the definitions for the noun street. Okay. It is a public thoroughfare, especially in a city, town or village, including all areas within the

6:03right of way, such as sidewalks and tree belts, and sometimes further distinguished as being wider than an alley or lane, but narrower than an avenue or boulevard, and as separating blocks rather than penetrating them.

6:20That's street.

Dry Definitions

6:22That's street. Very clear. So evocative. Very dry. This is the kind of definition that I think of really as a dictionary definition. This is a Webster's Third definition. Yeah. Absolutely. And so this is what you're sort of, as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, you're used to this style. You know it's, you know, it's going to be very, yeah, very formulaic, very dry, very scientific to the point of sort of ridiculousness at times, kind of like with

6:52street. And then I got to the entry for begonia. Which is a flower, but also a color? Right. Begonia is a flower, and it is also a color. So I got to the entry for begonia.

Color Definitions

7:08I began to proofread it. And yes, the etymology is correct. Yes, the pronunciation characters all rendered correctly. And yes, the flowers, the definition, very scientific. There's the taxonomy. And then I got to this definition. A deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral, see coral 3B, bluer than Fiesta, and bluer and stronger than Sweet William, called also

7:41Gaiety. I was like, what is this? This feels kind of beautiful. Yeah. And also, bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral. It's kind of like that, that assumes a whole lot about... I have a lot of questions about average coral now. Yes, right. Exactly. Like, I didn't realize that there was such a thing as average coral. Yeah. Average in comparison to what? Average, like, what's average about it?

8:11And I feel like people disagree about what color coral is. So if we averaged all their opinions, do we end up with average coral? Or like... Oh, you would think that. But that's not what average means in this definition. So... Oh, no. Right.

Sea Pink Color

8:26I also... What colors are Gaiety and Sweet William? I've never seen those. Exactly. Or Fiesta. What color is Fiesta? Those are, like, okay, I can... Coral, at least, I can recognize as a color. Yeah. But then you get to something like Fiesta. So I would run into these as I was proofreading. And it became kind of my, like, subtle and sly way to take a break while still at my desk. I'd get overwhelmed. I'd be like, okay, I'm just gonna... I'm gonna pick a word. And I'm gonna pick a color

8:56name. And I would pick a color name. And then I would follow all the links, the sort of bluer and brighter than, or yellower and duller than, or darker and redder than. And I'd followed those. And inside of these color definitions, which did have this very particular formula to them, so they kind of were formulaic in the way that Webster's third definitions are, it was just ridiculous to me, A, how they were structured, and B, there were so many color names that I had

9:32never heard of. And this is a dictionary that is supposed to be based on common usage. And I'm like... We don't know three of the colors in that first definition. Yeah. And I remember in particular, one definition... Well, now I have to find it. Sorry. Give me a second. So this is a great example. I got to coral, because of course, I was like, what's average coral? Went to coral. And I found coral 3b, which was the one referenced. But then beneath it was another

10:11color definition that reads, a strong pink that is yellower and stronger than carnation rose, bluer, stronger, and slightly lighter than rose dalthea, and lighter, stronger, and slightly yellower than sea pink. And I hit sea pink and lost my mind. Because the sea is blue. So what is sea pink? That doesn't make any sense.

10:43Oh, whereas I thought algal bloom, which is not quite as evocative. I feel like when I read sea pink there, I was like, oh, yeah, that's the color the sea is in a sunset, when the sun reflects pinkly on the sea. But... You know, well, this is the thing, right? You hear a color name like that. That's not a color name that's associated with a thing, or with sort of the basic color categories. And all you have to go on is your own internal association with those words, not necessarily the color itself. Because I, like,

11:20I had no category for sea pink. I just was like, does not compute. My brain just stopped working at that point. But I really wanted to know, how did these get into this dictionary? Because they had so much, the more that I read, it's like, these are so rich and textured. And it just, like, there's so many of them. And I also, these don't match. Yeah. And they clearly exist as a system within each other, right? Because, like, you know, here's

11:53begonia referring to average coral, and here's coral referring to sea pink. And I assume if you kept going to sea pink, it would refer to some other ones that would also be in Webster's third. So, like, clearly there is some mind or minds behind all of them together as a system.

Color Research

12:09Right. And if it's not something that's, like, these, lots of these definitions were not carried through to other Webster's dictionaries. So it's kind of like they exist in this frozen time capsule. That is the third. So not just who, but why did we not continue to use these? Why is there no definition for sea pink in any of the later dictionaries either? So, like, it is this weird little, it's a little puzzle. Like, oh, it's just a little puzzle. And you can put the pieces of the

12:44puzzle together by going through the internal archives at Merriam-Webster. And then kind of that's how the research really began. So I started with these slips. And then 10 years later, I was in, you know, archives and knocking on random people's doors to ask to read their grandparents' letters. And, you know, like, like most people.

13:10Tell us about this research process, because as far as I'm concerned, you wrote this cool blog post in 2014. And then when Word by Word came out, you mentioned that a chapter had gotten deleted from that book because it was really its whole own book. And I was like, I bet it's the color chapter because I have been following this color thing since it was a blog post. And there wasn't anything about color in that book. And I was like, but there should be because I know there's a really meaty chapter about color. Right. So how did that become the color research and the color book?

13:40So that initial chapter that was cut from my first book, Word by Word, was kind of about how hard it is to define colors, color names, and the word color itself. Like, what is color? Let's come back to that question later. Yes. Yeah. How many hours do we have? How many days do we have? How many people's entire careers do we have? Exactly. My editor said, this is not a chapter for this book. This is the first chapter of your next book. So when you're done with this book,

14:14do the next one. It's great. So I started by how do we define color? And why do we need to define color this particular way in the third? And that led me to, well, it led me to a bunch of places. I'll try and go in order. Led me first to the in-house archive at Merriam-Webster. So Merriam-Webster is a, you know, working publishing company, but they also have this on-site repository of slips,

14:48basically, that are production slips and bits of language and draft definitions that go all the way back to the late 1890s. And there are more slips in off-site archives. So I don't think it's a surprise that a organization run by people who are meticulously paying attention to language are also meticulous, almost to a fault, I think, with some of the documents you were talking about, at keeping track of everything that everyone writes and

15:23everyone touches in the dictionary-making process, which sounds like a nightmare to keep track of, but it sounds like an absolute treasure trove for putting together the story of color in this dictionary. Yeah, it was. And it is this sort of, you know, we're very lucky that we are all paper hoarders, because we all just, you know, everyone kept every slip, every piece of paper, every letter. And the slips are like index cards, primarily.

15:53They are index cards, yes. There are, inside baseball, there are three primary kinds of slips. There are citation slips, which are white, three by five index cards. Okay. There are definition slips, which are on yellow or buff index cards. So those are called buffs. Right. And then there are production notes, back and forth to each other, that are on pink index cards. Those are called pinks. So already the whole system is wrapped in color. We have buffs and

16:29pinks. So going through, I would just, for instance, I'd pick coral, and I would go over to the giant banks of card catalogs. And I just start going through who came up with this. And I found that we had this name, there was not a name that I recognized as any of the staff names that was stamped on all of these. These were all meticulously typed out. And the name was Godlove. So that sends

17:00me to the next part of the archive, which is all of these old files for finding what were called special editors or consultants. So this was a real revelation to me that this whole, like, as though a dictionary wasn't already enough naming and editorial and administrative work, that there are also all these people who aren't full-time in-house lexicographers who come in as outside experts.

17:30Right. And the people who are invited to come in as outside experts are usually at the top of their fields, especially in this era. So this would have been the beginning of the 20th century, from the 1930s onward. And those people, it was not just sort of an extra CV line for those people, but it was also a show, the dictionary that this consumer was going to drop a huge amount of money on was written by the best and the brightest in the industries. So the third had 202 named consultants.

18:12There were other consultants that also did work on this. But if you go through the pages in the print dictionary, you'll see basically little CV lines for every single consultant, what their area was. This is like the Influenza crossover of its day. Yeah. Yeah. For a very, very niche group of people. Yeah. For academics. Yeah. So would this be like, for things like the scientific name of begonia, you need to have like a botany consultant to do all your plants, or you need to have like a chemistry consultant to do

18:48your oxygen and your hydrogen, or you need to have like a astronomy consultant to do your constellations or something like this. Absolutely. And it wasn't just the hard sciences, what we think of as the hard sciences, but there were consultants for everything. I love that there is a consultant in listed in Webster's third for the Mayan calendar, and only the Mayan calendar. Love it. Like you do. You need to have someone who knows about it.

19:19As though we could ever accuse anyone else of being too niche. Right. Exactly. So what kind of expert was Godlove officially? I.H. Godlove was a – What a name. I know, right? Physical chemist. And so people called him – like his friends called him I.H. Yes. They didn't call him whatever they stood for. Yeah. His full name was Isaac Hahn Godlove, and he went by I.H. Great. I.H. was a physical chemist. He was employed at the time that Merriam-Webster first contacted him.

19:51He was putting together a color exhibit for the Museum of Science and Industry in New York. And he was a really fascinating guy because he was educated right on the cusp of when color moved from being sort of philosophical and applied chemistry, so dye stuffs and things like that, to a lot more of the, like, physics, chemistry, optics, kind of, you know, a little bit more

20:26theoretical. One of Godlove's biggest contributions to science, to color science, was in illumination. So he was a guy who sort of helped measure what's the best light to measure color under. What's the color of that light? We talk about cool, cool light. I guess you need to know that. Yeah. So things like daylight, your daylight LED bulb, which we now think of as like, oh, this, the daylight bulb is, what is it, like 400 or 4,000 lumens or 4,000 something.

21:01He, he was one of the first people to start measuring those things to say, okay, daylight 65 is the optimal way to look at this set of colors and daylight 50 is used this way. And so, so he was a chemist. He, over his career, worked at DuPont as a dye stuff specialist. So he measured colors in dyes. He then went to the color research laboratory for general aniline, which now is GAF.

21:35If you know anything about GAF, you know that they make roof tiles. That's sort of what people know now.

21:43But he, he was this, he was sort of this, he was very well-respected scientist. And he was also a scientist that just had tendrils and links with scientists in all these other areas that touched on color. So he was kind of the perfect guy to get in to define these things. That's the cool thing about color, right? Because first of all, you know, if you want to have clothing or fabric being dyed a particular color and you want to be able to match, okay, the, you know, red fabric that I bought last time and the fact that I bought this time, I want to be able to continue making garments

22:16out of them and have them be the exact same color so that I don't have this, like, top half of the, you know, dress in one color and the bottom half in a slightly different shade of red. Or the sort of military camo application where you actually want the military camouflage garments to show up in the same shades of camouflage as the other ones, because otherwise it doesn't camouflage that great. Right, right, yeah. Big point here. But at the same time, like, paints in things, like makeup, like dyes for other stuff, like product photography, like food dyes, like there's so many different areas of life that color

22:50and color standardization and color description in this very precise way ends up touching on. Oh, absolutely. And it was so interesting to start researching color because I had not kind of like when people first become interested in linguistics and they start thinking about language as something to be studied, you don't realize how much of your world is affected by different color standards, different color formulas.

23:22I mean, we get used to thinking of white as something that's colorless, but in fact, white as a product, as a color, has like thousands of different formulas and thousands of different applications. And like this particular white, which is used as an enamel coating on dryers and dishwashers is not the same, you know, enamel white that's used as a car color, which is not the same enamel white that's used on your high gloss bathroom door.

23:53Like it's just these things that we think of as like, oh, it's white. It's actually there's 17 different shades of white in like the white that I'm looking at at my wall right now. And the cross consistency, because when computers were early on, like it was so common to see an image on one of those old CRT screens that like the colors were very different from what the photo of that object would look like in real life with early digital cameras or with scanning of things. The color would often shift dramatically.

24:24The colors on the monitors would be dramatically different. But these days when I look up something on my phone, I'm like, oh, I want to buy this pair of shoes. Here's what color they are. And they show up. I'm not surprised by that color. Like we've gotten so much better at that. Yeah, though, not always. Yeah, that's okay. That's fair. Not always. So one of one of my favorite things to to do when I give talks about color definitions is I will do a web search for the color taupe. And I will just take all the different swatches that are called taupe on one monitor and line

25:02them up. And you get everything from like, in context, like something that looks really bright yellow to something that's kind of dark and purplish, right? It's because color is, I think we like to think or we're accustomed to thinking that color, a color and its name are intrinsically tied together, right? Gretchen and I once had a big fight. Oh, yeah. When we were deciding on the purple that we were going to use when we were designing the

25:34LingCom logo, and I was like, I just think this is a very like balanced, clean, like I know purple's not a primary color, but it's a, what is it called? A focal purple. Secondary color. Like it's just a really non-contested purple. And Gretchen was like, can we just get something that's less, like can we just make it a bit cooler if we want it to be balanced? Yeah. And it turned out that someone. Yeah, hers was like a really grapy color. Someone, who was not me, had their going to bed yellow filter on their screen.

26:11And for this 30 seconds before we realized what was happening, it just felt like, it felt like we had both lost touch with reality. Because we, as far as we were concerned, looking at the same image, but seeing very different and then we realized what had happened. And it's just like, as the need for color to become more specific and replicable develops and the more scientific methods get created for being specific and consistent, you start

26:47to get this like gulf between, I'm just a person living my life who's like, this is a purpley purple, and I'm a scientist who needs to differentiate between 50 different purples that are all right next to each other. Right. Yeah. It starts with science, but it moves into all these other things as well. Right? So fashion is a great example of like this very common application of color where you need to have this really clear description of what, you know, this color, which we're going to

27:23call Misty Mountain is. And, and not just a description of like, here's the formula for creating it, because those formulas are all different depending on the application. And depending on what they go on, the color's not consistent. So there's all these things about color production, where you really, you can't rely necessarily on numbers to get color across. You do have to have sort of a standardized way of describing it, either with words or in like

27:58a stable printed color standard. And let me tell you, stable printed color standards are insanely expensive. And just because you have one doesn't mean you can match a color to a color chip. And like, stable is an operative word here, because we all have old books that are yellowing, which creates the same problem. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The more you expose things to light, the more they'll fade, the more, yeah. I mean, this is the whole idea of, of a color standard or how to describe color or how

28:33to show color, like, this has been a problem since color has been in use, period. So, so when, when it was time to write the third, Godlove was approached.

Intersociety Color Council

28:48And the, the whole drive behind Webster's third was, this is a new dictionary for a new age. So, previously, dictionaries, especially unabridged dictionaries, there were consultants and special editors who would write and help, but it was the, it was these very, like, these long disquisitions on, like, what is an escapement? And how does an escapement work? And in what applications would one find an escapement? You know, it was just kind of, it went on.

29:20It was very encyclopedic. And when the third was, was being conceived of, A, the publisher and president was like, we can't afford to print a bigger dictionary. The technology does not exist to print a larger dictionary. It breaks the limits of dictionary production technology. Yeah. Like this, this book is too thick. And we can't split it into two books, because the public doesn't want to buy two books. Exactly. No one's going to buy a two-volume dictionary.

29:51That's stupid. So, we have to keep it in one volume. And the managing editor that they brought in was a man, he was a linguist. He was someone who was really absolutely convinced that the way that we need to move forward is to sort of get rid of all of this fluff, get rid of all of this cultural information, really focus on pure language. His name was Philip Babcock Gove. He's the subject of a bunch of different books.

30:22And he was a very particular man. He had very particular ideas about how to implement things. And he very much felt that if this is going to be a dictionary for a new age, which was, this was, this was being written in the early 50s. So, we were just coming out of World War II. We're in the Cold War in America. We are sort of seeing this big post-war scientific boom.

30:54And we're also having lots of conversations about the place of science in society. Gove said, if we're going to have this brand new dictionary for a new age, it has to be based on scientific principles, because that's what's objective. And this needs to be an objective record of language. But yeah, so, but even still, the third as a print book is, I think it's like 14 pounds. It's huge. It's like 11 by 17. It's an enormous book. So, even still, these are enormous books, which is kind of why you can see from a marketing standpoint,

31:31why Gove wanted to like smash it down to just pure language, because there's also a ton of new language to enter into the dictionary, right? We have all the scientific terminology that's coming out. And sort of saying this is going to be a dictionary of pure language also makes it attractive in terms of the idea that this is going to be a universal standard, right? We love universal standards, if we can get them.

32:03And this is... Especially in the 1950s and 60s. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We knew everything in the 1950s and 60s, let me tell you. So, Gove said, this is going to be a dictionary of pure language. Whatever gets entered needs to have evidence of current use. And anything technical is going to be defined by the, you know, as we have done, by the top consultants, by the top minds in their field. But everything is going to be run through an in-house editor to dictionaryize it.

32:39So they can't just wax on about the heart of beast or whatever. Yeah. And Gove felt very strongly that lexicography was a skill that needed to be taught and honed, and not everyone could do lexicography. So he really focused heavily on this really overwhelming workload where he said, all right, all of our in-house editors are defining according to this very rigid style that was brand new. And they're also overseeing the work of all of these consultants, and they are taking what all the special editors are turning in, and they're cutting it down into this pure, lovely Govian definition.

33:22And they're also corresponding with the general public, and this isn't the only dictionary Merriam-Webster's working on at this time. Yeah. And language just keeps changing, and you have to keep chasing it. I don't understand how – I mean, I guess lexicographers just live in a permanent state of existential drain. Yeah, basically. Yeah, basically.

33:44Basically. And especially for a dictionary like The Third, it was behind and over budget, like from jump. Like there was just no way they were going to meet any of their production timelines. And so there were just lots of points where certain things were kind of like, eh, it's good enough. It's good enough. And one of those things was this very weird formula for color defining.

34:15Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to get back to Godlove. So we bring in this color expert and say, okay, you're in charge of color definitions now. What happens? So part of what was so fascinating about Godlove – remember I said he had tendrils kind of everywhere. Yeah. And one of those things was that he was one of the founding members of something called the Intersociety Color Council, which was a group of people from arts, industry, and science who agreed to meet together to solve color problems.

34:49And those color problems were everything from what's the best kind of light to use to measure color to one of their earliest problems. It was called Problem 2. Problem 2 was how do we come up with a plain language way to describe color? Sounds like that would be useful for a dictionary. Yeah, funny that – though it wasn't a dictionary that started it. It was actually what's called the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, which was basically like a list of all the drugs that were available to pharmacists.

35:24Okay, and why do we need to worry about color for drugs? I feel like we were on – we've just gone down a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole. Part of it is because this is also before we had like Walgreens and like easily compounded medications that were available over the counter. If you needed something from your pharmacist, you would go and say, I, you know, my stomach's not feeling great. And they would literally mix up something using different chemicals, using different herbal remedies like at the desk.

36:01And they had the pharmacopoeia. So if you want like an antacid, they're going there being like, okay, well, I've got some, you know, sodium bicarbonate and I've got some, you know, something else. I'm going to add all these things like here you go. I've mixed it together just for you. Exactly. And a lot of these things, a lot of their basic ingredients were, you know, they were all powders or liquids and they were all brown or white, basically. Like that's what you got. Right. And, but, you know, if you're – let's say you're pulling, you know, something off the – you've got acidic titanicum and acidic tartaricum because also they all use Latin names at this point.

36:43And they're right on the shelf next to each other and they're in brown little bottles. You don't see what they are. And you're grabbing one for the person who has an upset stomach and wants an antacid and you grab the wrong one. Oh. And you mix it and you have actually given them like a diarrheal. Like that's not great. Yeah. No. Oops. Yeah. So the pharmacopoeia was a description of what each of these ingredients was and what it would do and what to compound it with.

37:14And one of the main descriptions was this is a powder or a liquid that is this color because that was kind of how you could distinguish some of these things. But the colors, the colors they used were weird. Like there was one that the team focused on, this group of people solving their color naming problem. One of the drugs was described as blackish white. Hey, um. Which is – I think that's how colors work. I know. Do we mean gray?

37:45I have some questions. I know. And why not gray? Not that whitish black is much better. Blackish and how white? Yeah, exactly. Or reddish green. Like, well, those – is that brown? What is that? So the ISCC, the Intersociety Color Council, decided they were going to help out the U.S. pharmacopoeia by coming up with sort of standardized ways to describe colors using plain language.

38:15Okay. Because again, remember, well before photography was good or was useful in books like this. Yeah. So as they got into it, they realized one of the problems is how do you describe – here's one tan powder and here's another tan powder. Slightly darker. And there's slightly different tans, yeah, but how – like, this is a little darker, but how much darker?

38:46Like, what's our scale here? Because we don't have, like, a whole lot of blue powders and green powders that be really distinct from each other. It's – yeah. Right. Yeah. And how – you know, if this is a reddish liquid, and this is also a reddish liquid, but this reddish liquid is browner and this other reddish liquid is orange – like, how do you describe that? Oh, no. And this overlaps with sort of something that was happening in the sciences where you would get a color standard, let's say, that someone came to you and said, hey, we are a weaving company.

39:27And we weave cotton, and we need to know, just by looking at a giant 400-pound bale of cotton, whether it's good quality or not. And we also know that certain people are going to want cotton to be whiter and brighter, and that cotton that comes in that's yellower may not be worse quality, but it can't be used for certain things.

39:58So basically, companies would go to government agencies in the U.S. and say, give us a bunch of color cards so that we can – when we get cotton in – We need, like, a color grading system for our cotton. So when we get, you know, 700 bales of cotton in, we basically just have a little card we can go through and say, this one's grade A, this one's grade B, this one's grade C, based only on color. Nifty. I mean, like, the same thing exists for – just to be incredibly Canadian about it – the same thing exists for people's syrup, it gets graded by color.

40:30Yeah. Is it golden? Is it amber? Is it dark? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, like, I have seen the little – they have little – in the modern day, they have little, like, colorometer, and you put, like, a drop of syrup in, and it does the little – you look through the little light thing, and it does the little analysis for you, and then it, like, pops something out. But, like, how did we get that result? Yeah. Right. So all of – so color measurement was, like, the new hotness in the early 20th century. And the way that it was mostly done before computers was by eye. People would, you know, people would use mirrors or spinning disks. That was a great one. People would get a thing that looks like a top, and they – it's tipped up on its side, and you put different colors of paper on it and spin that, and then it optically blends into one color.

41:18So is that a way of seeing, like, how much blue and how much green a color has in it? Because if you put all the blues and greens on a spinning disk and spin it together, you can get a precise shade of purple or whatever? Yeah, exactly. Right. So I can be like, okay. Wow, that's clever. So, yeah. So you can be like, if I take this, you know, red card that is this kind of red, and this yellow card that's this kind of yellow, and this white, and this blue that's this kind of blue, and I've got 45% red, and I've got 3% yellow, and I've got 5% white, and I've got – that's going to spin to be this exact purple.

41:50Hmm. It's such an early 20th century story that color was becoming more scientific as – the dictionary is becoming more scientific, but that almost all of this was achieved through men sending very polite but quite terse letters to each other. So much of what I love in true color is just these men being quite snippy at each other. So snippy. As, you know, one's an expert in one thing – one's an expert in color, one's an expert in dictionaries, and these two meet in these wonderfully fantastical definitions, but, like, it's a slog to get from.

42:30Yeah. We both have our own agendas here to what does get produced in the third. Absolutely. There is this constant tension then and now between, well, this is the technically correct way to think about color and talk about color, and this is the way, this other way, is the way that we all experience color. And that was this huge source of frustration for the editors who are dealing with Godlove and Godlove dealing with the dictionary was – Godlove was saying, okay, you're saying, for instance, the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue.

43:12And they are not red, yellow, and blue. Red, yellow, and blue, as subtractive primaries, do not mix to neutral gray. And I will say that, and anyone who knows anything about color mixing who's listening to this will go, absolutely. And anyone who does not is like, what are you talking about? Of course – like – It's like, but I watched Sesame Street, and Sesame Street told me that the primary colors were red and blue and yellow. Exactly. What do you mean it's, like, cyan and yellow and magenta?

43:44Right. Is that what we're talking about? Yeah, cyan, yellow, and magenta. Your printer has those cartridges? Yeah, and that's one type of primary – set of primary colors. That's true. There's light as well. Yeah, and that's red, green, and blue, RGB. So you have – so this is sort of where science is going. Science is saying we have the technology to pull it apart, not build it. But we can see now what color is made of. We can talk about light in this very particular scientific way.

44:14We can say that objects do not have color, that color is an interaction between light, a stimulus, the eye, and the brain. And that's great for scientists. And for anybody who's not, that's so bad. It's like, excuse me, I have a blue water bottle, and it's just blue. Like, don't tell me it doesn't have a color, and it's just a product of my light and the environment. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'm on. Exactly. Look at it, it's blue. So, yeah, so much of my research in both the interior, internal archives at Merriam-Webster, and then sort of going out, I found I.H. Godlove's grandchildren, and they kept a bunch of his papers.

44:59So I got to read a bunch of papers there. Amazing. I got to read in the inter-society color council, how they developed this plain language way of describing different gradations of color. And, but all of this really is this, like, very early 20th century, like, dear sir slash madam. Like, it's, it tends to be very formal, and yeah, very snippy in the dictionary world.

45:30And your book doesn't read like that. Your book is much more fun than this sort of, like, dear sir, I have a, I have an important point to make. I have a numbered list of points that I wish to address at length. So, we have done a lengthusiasm episode on color, and in that we started with a big research project from 1969 by a team called Berlin and Kay, who figured out what the boundaries of the kind of basic color terms are for English speakers.

46:06And this was replicated for a bunch of other languages, and it's so funny because teaching, like, the linguistics of color terms, the story starts for me in 1969. But Berlin and Kay could only have done that work if all of this 20th century scientific standardizing of, can we get some objective labels to consistently represented colors for blues and greens and reds? And then we can give them to people, and they can have a big old argument about the boundaries of those colors.

46:38And so, what is kind of the start of that earlier color episode for us is really something that comes very late in true color, where it kind of comes full circle back around to that perception and general usage for color names and really basic color terms. Yeah. And what's really fascinating is the work that Berlin and Kay did and sort of the rubric that they came up with and saying, for those of you who don't know, Berlin and Kay basically did a big study to say, not just what are the boundaries of sort of the basic color terms.

47:16Like, when I say basic color term, I mean, when you're describing magenta or cerulean to someone, what's the color bucket you put that in? Like, is magenta a pink or is it a purple for you? Is cerulean a green or a blue? Like, those are the basic color terms, those buckets. And what Berlin and Kay's work did was to say, here are the 11 buckets that we all sort color into. These are our basic color terms.

47:48In English. In English. And then they also did some work to say, when other languages that are not English add color terms, they add them in a particular order. Now, that's hotly debated. So, and we won't get into that. But, but the idea was that there are, in fact, sort of these basic color terms that we can use. And the thing that's fascinating is that work that Berlin and Kay did, and that a lot of people sort of say, oh, these basic color terms date back to 1969, the Berlin and Kay study.

48:22Those basic color terms actually had been in use and were codified in Merriam-Webster dictionaries and through the Inner Society Color Council's work 30 years prior to Berlin and Kay. 40 years prior to Berlin and Kay. So, there is something about, you know, we do have, color language is like all language. We do have a shared experience of it. And there are things that we can all sort of agree on. Like, that there is a difference between red and orange.

48:54Now, where that difference is, we'll argue about that forever. We do think of it in linguistic circles as the beginning of sort of color terminology, but it really comes at the end. It's built on dozens and dozens of years of work prior. So, one of the most exciting things for me was getting about three quarters of the way through true color and then being like, hold on, wait, we've been missing part of the story. Especially if Gretchen has her night filter on.

49:28But I also want people to be able to have that experience sort of fresh. And especially because this episode goes up a few days before true color comes out, I really encourage people to get it. I don't want to necessarily spoil people for that. Because I want to know everything about how the research for this came to be, but I also don't want to spoil people before they had the chance to read it. So, please stay tuned in two weeks to the Lingthusiasm Patreon where we will have this bonus episode. You have time to read the book first. You also have time to get on the Patreon and listen to the previous bonus episodes. If you are lucky enough to be listening from the future and everything is out already, you may be able to just get it right now.

50:07I enjoyed the plot twist so much that we are going to leave you with the opportunity to read True Color when it comes out in the end of March. And then we'll do a bonus episode where we'll chat with Corey about – I'm so sorry to do a cliffhanger, but we can't fit all of this interesting color nudery in one episode anyway, so this way you get to hear from Corey twice. Lucky you. Corey, if you could leave people knowing one thing about language, what would it be?

50:37I think one of the things I love telling people about language and one of the things that I hope people remember about language is we are taught to think of language as something outside of us, something that sort of is this rarefied external thing that we have to sort of master, right? Like the Sphinx's riddle. But language is an embodied thing. We all carry language in us, and so it's very personal.

51:09And so the thing I think I would like everyone to take with them is the knowledge that language isn't something to wrestle with or isn't something that is outside of your ken, because it is entirely out of who you are, where you are, what you do. And that includes things like how you see colour, and how you describe colour. For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com, and you can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com slash transcripts. And you can follow at Lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns

52:00on them, including IPA, branching tree diagrams, booba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch, like our etymology Isn't Destiny notebooks and stickers at lingthusiasm.com slash merch. My social media and blog are superlinguo. Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show

52:34running ad-free, go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm, or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include idioms, child lore, and an updates chat for 2026, in which we also take the Which Character of the IPA Are You quiz? You can also subscribe to the Lingthusiasm Patreon right now so that you're first in line to get the true colour, Corey Stamper plot twist that we didn't want to spoil in this episode, but we did discuss

53:05at length with Corey, and we're so excited to share that part with you. You can follow our guest, Corey Stamper, on Instagram at harmlessdrudge and on bluesky at coreystamper.bsky.social. Her first book is called Word by Word, and her new book is called True Colour. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who's curious about language. Or you can leave us a nice review, like this one from Calliador, who says, Funny banter between two likeable hosts. Perfect for us who are fascinated by language diversity

53:35and analysis. Sit back and enjoy. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne. Our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierella. Our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billens. Our editorial assistant is John Crook. Our technical editor is Leah Thelman. Our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic!