It’s Not Orange, It’s Persimmon, Damnit!
CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO MAKE IT INTERACTIVE
This article from The Atlantic: It’s Not Pink, It’s Fuchsia: Women Like Complex Names for Their Colors got me to thinking about describing colors in my writing.
According to The Atlantic article:
Stephen Von Worley used data from an XKCD color survey, where more than 5 million users were shown colors and had to type in a word or phrase to describe the color. The bigger the dot on the interactive, the more people wrote that color.
The higher up it is plotted, the more women used that name. The lower on the chart, the responses were more male. The simpler color names like red, green and blue are the large dots, and they tend to skew about 55 percent male. The top half of the chart shows the color names more women volunteered: dark moss green, buttercup, or lilac.
(To explore the graphic above in a very cool interactive way, go here to DataPointed.Net.)
EVEN MARS WRITERS MUST KEEP ONE FOOT ON THE PLANET VENUS
For me as a writer, there’s a lot more to this than a Mars and Venus thing. Every writer must paint the most accurate picture possible in a reader’s head. You get a certain amount of information you read the word “dog.” But a lot MORE information is conveyed by Golden Retriever or Alsatian. Same thing describing color.
Pink may be from Mars and fuchsia from Venus, but Venus is offering more information about the shade, tint and precise color. Even though I’m your basic Mars guy, when I’m writing, I have to channel Venus.
Click image to enlarge
To do that, I use The Pantone Book of Color which is now out of print and expensive as all Hell. But it gives me pages like the image above with names of colors next to the color (click image to enlarge). Instead of staying on Mars with Orange, I get a Venus translation guide and descriptions like Persimmon, Paprika Salmon, Peach and Grenadine.
Often the book gives me inspiration and I come up with another name. Other times, I have a color in mind and have to flip through the pages to match what I have in mind (literally).
I think it must be cool to be a “native speaker” of Venus colors. Like any other sort of language, fluency and accuracy are always better than in translation.
TELL ME HOW I’M DOING
If you already have one of my books, please leave a comment, tell me how I did on the Mars/Venus color thing.
And if you don’t have one of my books … GET ONE! Try Die By Wire which was just re-edited and uploaded this past weekend, or check out descriptions of one of my others at Lew’s Books
