#colour terms

Bonus 110: The pink-collar labour of colour words - Part II with Kory Stamper

The dedication at the beginning of TRUE COLOR by Kory Stamper is "For Margaret". When we started reading it, we assumed that Margaret was someone important to Kory herself. But midway through, we got hit with a paintbombshell: Margaret Godlove was also the key to the strangely evocative colour definitions in Webster's Third International Dictionary. Like this one:

coral: a strong pink that is yellower and stronger than carnation rose; bluer, stronger, and slightly lighter than rose Delphia; and lighter, stronger, and slighter yellower than sea pink.

This bonus episode is the second half of our interview with Kory Stamper about her book on defining colour words, and this half contains spoilers! If you missed the first half, it's available for free on our main podcast feed, and if you like to experience history spoiler-free in book form, you can pick up True Color first. But then come back here for our discussion with Kory about how she learned about Margaret Godlove and many other women whose labour has been forgotten in early colour science and dictionary making.

A particularly ironic tale of translation gone awry on The Geeky Gaeilgeoir:

I’m often baffled by the number of people who seem to think that you can translate from one language to another simply by pulling the words of one language from a dictionary and plugging them into the syntax of the other. It just doesn’t work that way, friends. Repeat after me: “Languages are not codes for one another.”

That’s exactly what happened here, though. Someone either found a dictionary or searched the internet for the three words “blue,” “lives,” and “matter,” and stuck them together as if they were English. Oy. Dia sábháil (that’s Ulster Irish for “oy”).

[...]

Another thing this poor “translator” apparently forgot is that the word “lives” in English can be pronounced to rhyme with “gives” or with “hives,” and that the meaning changes accordingly.

What was wanted here, of course, is “lives” as rhymes with “hives.” Three guesses as to which one the “translator” chose. Yep. Wrong one.

[...]

The funny thing here is, the Irish word gorm actually does mean “blue” in most contexts. Just not in this manner, and definitely not in this context.

When color is used to describe a person in Irish, it typically refers to hair color. For example An bhean rua: The red-haired woman. [...]

All that having been said, though, here’s the lovely, delicious irony: When the word gorm is used in reference to people, guess what it means?

It means “Black.”

People of African descent, or with similarly dark skin, are described as “blue” in Irish (most likely because dubh (“black”) and dorcha (“dark”) have negative connotations in the language and donn (“brown”) would be understood to refer to hair color).

That’s right. At the end of the day, allowing for grammatical travesties (of which there are many) and horrendous word choices, what this person’s shirt says is “Black Lives Matter.”

However, rather than a particular hue, it is the connotations carried by glaukos that are of essence for the characterization of Athena, who is a goddess with a flashing, darting gaze. The same types of eyes that are dangerous or 'foreign' in humans, and unattractive in women, are appropriate for a deity known for her intelligence, her masculinity and her association with the large-eyed owl, the glaux. As the warrior virgin, moreover, she is a goddess who, unlike mortals, needs no protection herself from the potentially harmful gazes of others. In fact, Athena's gaze itself has the potential to destroy, an ability that finds its most powerful manifestation in connection with the Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turns those she looks on to stone and whose head regularly adorns Athena's aegis. The association can go even deeper when Athena's own gaze becomes fused with that of the Gorgon through her epithet Gorgopis ('Gorgon-eyed').”

Is "gray" really the right translation here? Because I'm pretty sure that none of these animals are known for their grey eyes. This is why I prefer it when glaukopis is translated as „bright-eyed” or something similar rather than as a reference to a particular colour. Γλαυκός could be translated not only as grey but also as blue or green or any combination between these, and it is probably even broader than that. As mentioned in Deacy and Villing’s „What was the Colour of Athena’s Aegis, it can be the colour of the sea, the sky, the olive, the vine, the moon, the dawn, etc, and „glaukos is a gleaming, shimmering colour, inherently luminous beyond any connotations of hue.”.

 Also according to this article, „The origin of this word can be traced all the way back to Homer, who used glaukos to describe the color of water, the color of eyes, the color of leaves, and the color of honey. It’s often translated as “gleaming,” which reflects the fact that this word wasn’t really about color, but rather the reflective properties of the object and the texture and movement of its surface. In Green: The History of a Color, Michel Pastoureau writes that the word was used ‚extensively” by archaic poets and “can sometimes express green, sometimes gray or blue, sometimes even yellow or brown. It conveys the idea of a color’s paleness or weak concentration rather than a precisely defined shade.’”

Martial, on the other hand, comments on the odors of purple clothing: Lunata nusquam pellis et nusquam toga olidaque vestes murice. Nowhere will be seen the crescent shoe, nowhere the toga, And clothes smelling strongly of purple dye. The unpleasant odors associated with murex dye were apparent from the production process to the wearing of the final product. Because the dye was produced by boiling mollusks, a strong and unpleasant scent of rotting shellfish was an unfortunate but necessary by-product. For this reason the manufacturing plants were situated in less desirable districts of the city; Martial recognized the negative aspects of murex because even if it was desirable to the elite, its stench, which he may have experienced at first hand, was repulsive. Strabo says the dye works of Tyre smelled so badly that the city, while rich, was ‘unpleasant to live in.’ . . .

Other purple shades and their dyers’ collegia are mentioned in inscriptions. One such inscription mentions an amarantus, a colorator or dyer of the color amaranthus, or lilac. The reddish-purple liquid dye ostrum was extracted, like murex, from sea shells and mixed with honey or fish glue as a preservative. Other examples include amethystinus, ianthinus, ostrinus (derived from oysters), and tyrianthinus (a variation on Tyrian purple). Another documented lavender dye, conchyliatus, mentioned by Pliny, was made from a combination of murex, water and urine. Returning to Plautus, in Aul. 514 molocinarii are dyers of the color mauve, for which there is no Latin color term, but there is a Greek color-term, μολόχη. This term is only used by Plautus, suggesting that this dye was used in the second century BCE, still comparatively early in the growth and spread of the empire and at a time when Rome was still heavily under the cultural influence of the Greeks. Two centuries later, Pliny, describing the mallow plant, says alius in malva ad purpuram inclinans — ‘this mallow plant tends to look purple.’ The Romans still do not have a separate word for the shade mauve in Latin that corresponds to the Greek word, suggesting that mauve dyers or molocinarii had a limited profession before they moved on to more desirable shades.”