J Crew classic satin ballet flats in Pale Peacock and Toasted Honey

[cimorene]

Sometimes I want to crash the national convention of professional color namers and smack them all with a giant wet, scaly dead fish, you know?

Comments

[mrkinch]

I do! I do.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

Mom tells me that when I was little, my favorite game was looking through clothing catalogs and laughing hysterically at the color names. "Deep Regent? NOOOOO, that's BLUE!" 4-year-old me would have strongly supported your wet fish proposal.

[dorothy1901]

I will get you that giant wet, scaly, dead fish if you will help me out against the wine reviewers who describe their wines as tasting like any kind of animal, vegetable or mineral except grapes. To them, a wine can have hints of mulberry, oak and seaweed, but never, ever taste of grape.

[krait]

THIS, SO MUCH. I laugh myself silly at the "tastes of cherries and raspberries with overtones of mahogany" sort of wine descriptions, because 1. if it tasted like cherries instead of like spoiled grapes, I would actually drink it, and 2. really, how many people go round the lumber yard licking planks often enough that they have any clue what "mahogany" tastes like and how it compares to "oak" or whatever?

[krait]

B-b-but! I love colour names! :D I always thought I would like to be the person at Crayola who's responsible for coming up with names for crayon colours, because I am picky and I do see the distinctions between Royal Blue and Midnight Blue and between Red-Orange and Orange-Red.

[foursweatervests]

I would call them "Green" and "Yellow". I know, I know, far too descriptive and fanciful, but I like them!

[notemily]

I remember reading a review of various bottled waters when that started to become a thing in the 90s, with Volvic and Evian and the like. At the end of every review the guy would say "tastes like water."

[cimorene]

This is true, but that doesn't mean there aren't better and worse ones! I wouldn't put Evian high on the list, but Fiji is exquisite, and weirdly enough, that extra-oxygen artificial one that I can't remember the name of is also incredibly delicious, one of the best I've ever had. But my absolute favorite is Mountain Valley Spring, the water bottled in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I miss that water almost as much as I miss bagels and dill pickles and proper Mexican food.

[cimorene]

You've probably noticed a tendency at Crayola, in the tradition of many other makers of more professional art supplies, to be more descriptive, less fanciful, in their color names. There's nothing wrong with "red-orange" and "orange-red": that's exactly the kind of color names I like! Likewise colors named after the materials used historically to produce them in paint. These namers are safe from all piscine attacks, believe me. My ire is directed at people who name fabric, apparel, and paint chip colors with things like "Pale Peacock", which is a nonsensical suggestion anyway, and suggests something much bluer than the color up there, since green is not the dominant color on a peacock; or "Toasted Honey", when you can't actually toast honey at all, and the color in question is nothing like the result of combining the color of honey with the color of toast. Paint chip colors are way worse, though. They frequently have no discernable relationship to the colors they're naming whatsoever, which I think is actually dumber than a misleading or slightly wrong-headed one.

[cimorene]

One time for a fic I was researching I was reading a review of an aged Scotch, and it was possibly the least believable wine-taster-type description I've ever seen.

Also there was a great episode of Northern Exposure where Shelly accidentally destroyed a priceless bottle of wine and then got some friends to help her fake it. They added all kinds of stupid things, including peat moss for "earthiness".

[cimorene]

When we painted rooms in the house I'd always pick up giant stacks of paint chips and then methodically mock basically all the names on all of them. Great minds!

[dorothy1901]

There was an episode of Black Books with a similar plot. Manny and Bernard drank an extremely expensive bottle of wine that was meant to be a gift for the Pope. They refilled the bottle with all kinds of stuff. The Pope got very sick, poor guy.

[notemily]

Hee hee. I just thought it was amusing in light of the wine-description discussion. The reviewer did have specific things to say about each water. Personally I hate Dasani, but other than that I can take or leave most waters. Tap water, on the other hand, can literally make me sick if it's not properly processed. I guess I'm spoiled since I grew up on Lake Michigan.

[notemily]

I'd go with "gold" for the yellow one. I think maybe levels of color description can be likened to Crayola boxes. You're going with the 8-crayon box. I'm more fond of the 48-crayon one.

[foursweatervests]

You're also more likely to be hired to describe them. :-)