And I mean for real, not the hex code.

  • early_riser@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    I’d call it “olive”.

    I you’ll permit me a tangent, the linguistics of the senses are something that fascinate me. Color names have been studied a fair bit, and an oft-repeated (not sure how accurate) theory states that languages acquire color names in a particular order, starting with words for dark and light, then red, then green and yellow, and so on. As a student of Latin and to a much lesser extent Greek I was interested to find out that there’s no exact word for “blue” in classical Latin or Greek, hence Homer’s famous “wine-dark sea”.

    As a blind person I’m more interested in odor vocabulary. The dominant theory until recently is that language is incapable of describing odors as qualia distinct from the sources of those odors. That is, “green” describes a particular instance of subjective experience independent of grass or bile or any other green thing, but terms for odors all stem from analogies or just the words for their sources. Earth smells “earthy”, flowers smell “floral” and so on.

    But some research on minority languages spoken by hunter-gatherers living in Thailand suggest that at least some languages do have “odor colors” as I call them. I desperately want a non-technical breakdown of these studies, or indeed access to the papers at all, but the details are behind pay walls.

    Some of my conlangs are meant to have such odor colors based on the valence-arousal model of emotions since their speakers communicate mood through pheromones rather than body language. Their color words in contrast work like human odor words, only being able to describe color by analogy with something so colored.

  • backgroundcow@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    What kind of nerds do you claim to be in this thread?! Despite being late, I see no mention of the xkcd color survey: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

    As far as I can read just by eye, its “mustard” or “olive”, but funnily it also seem close to the one someone annotated: “really? this color again? i have nothing against colors personally, but this one just stands out from the rest as unusually unattractive. i almost feel sad for it, but it made the decision to be that color so it has to find a way to deal with it.”

    But, someone, feel free to dig into the hex codes to give a more definite answer.

    • early_riser@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.

      Made me laugh.