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English is weird
Elysiana:
And of course another good question is whether your (in general) words for certain colors correlate with others' words. Ryan, for example, will call something red and to me it is DISTINCTLY orange. Or call something blue when I see it as DISTINCTLY turquoise - almost green. I don't think he's color blind, he just divides it up much differently than most people would, I think.
Pilchard123:
IIRC, the ancient Greeks described the sky as being the same colour as a bronze shield. I think the word was 'bright', but I'm not certain.
idontunderstand:
My girlfriend is a nail artist and she can tell colors apart which look not only similar to me, but identical. With her I think it comes from practicing. I (kind of) refuse to believe it is a question of gender. Not that anyone has claimed that.
She's also super-sensitive to some colors and mixtures of colors and will say that, for example, a Miró painting makes her feel sick, just based on the colors.
Like this one she can't stand: http://uima.uiowa.edu/assets/Uploads/_resampled/SetWidth500-19483small.jpg
Elysiana:
I don't think it's a gender thing either - women probably just tend to be the ones that pay more attention to the names of colors, while guys just use a few names for a more general range. Most of the graphic artist guys I know can see just as many distinct colors as I can - like you said, it comes from practicing and working with them on a regular basis.
I wonder if your girlfriend has a slight bit of synesthesia!
Papersatan:
Also isn't color blindness a recessive gene on the X, making men much more likely to be color blind?
I have also wondered about this with respect to the color pink. My hair is pink, I think it is obviously pink, but people regularly, and particularly men, call is red. I wonder how much of this is just that women are somehow socialized to care about color more. But I would think with the social pressure for men to not wear or like pink that they would be particularly sensitive to identifying it?
I had a coworker once who couldn't tell pink from red, and I confirmed (by holding pink and red things next to each other) that he really couldn't tell the difference, not just that he was using red as a general word that covered pink.
He would tell me that the first color there was a little lighter than the second. To me it is also obviously a lot bluer. Pink is not "light red" it is a separate color, and the two colors clash.
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