Episode 126: True Color, with Kory Stamper
Note: this is mostly an automatic transcription, lightly edited and corrected. Punctuation and formatting are not perfect.
Marcie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Endless Knot Podcast.
Aven: Where the more we know
Marcie: The more we want to find out
Aven: Tracing serendipitous connections through our lives
Marcie: And across disciplines
Aven: Hi, I'm Aven.
Marcie: And I'm Marcie.
Aven: And today we're talking about color with Kory Stamper.
Marcie: Woo-hoo. Kory Stamper is a lexicographer who was an associate editor of the Merriam-Webster family of dictionaries, and now travels around the country giving talks and presentations, as well as memorably appearing in the 2021 Netflix series History of Swear Words.
She also does volunteer lexicography and language revitalization as a member of the Miami Nation of Indiana's Language Council.
Aven: Her debut nonfiction book was Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, and her second book, True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color, from Azure to Zinc [00:01:00] Pink, is out now.
We spoke to her about this new book and our mutual fascination with colors
So hi Kory. Welcome very much to our podcast. We are so excited to talk to you today. We have just finished listening to the book. We listened to it together. It was extremely exciting. Sorry, I'm already getting ahead of myself. Yes. But hi, welcome.
Kory: hello
Marcie: absolutely loved it.
Kory: I'm so glad It's so good to be here with you. Fine folk.
Aven: All right, so we'll start before we get into the book with our traditional first question, and I suspect you have many possible stories to tell, but tell us about an unexpected connection in your life, whether in your work, your research, your writing, your hobbies, whatever you would like.
Kory: had a fabulous, unexpected connection that happened just recently in part because of. and in part because of work. So I was signing my books at independent Bookstore Day [00:02:00] here in the US and I was at a bookstore that had a whole bunch of authors lined up, one after the other on the hour every hour. as I was finishing up my hour, a woman came in a very colorful shirt and said, oh, she picked up my books and she said, oh, what are your books about? And I said, oh, they're about dictionaries. said, oh, my uncle wrote a book about dictionaries. who's your uncle? And her uncle is Herbert Morton, or was Herbert Morton dearly departed Herbert Morton, who wrote one of the first histories of Webster's, third new international dictionary, which is the dictionary that I write about in my latest book.
So I said, oh yeah, of course I know Morton's book. I, anyone who writes about this book knows about Morton. And she threw her hands up and clasped them to her chest and yelled, you know about Uncle [00:03:00] Herbie? So So because of Uncle Herbie and because of this color book, I now am sort of an unofficial extended family member in the Morton family.
So I was introduced to everybody and. Uncle Morton's niece is also a writer and she was writing children's books and she just happened to be scheduled to sign right after I had finished signing. So it was like a big family reunion. It was great.
Aven: that. Yeah. Speaking of unexpected. That's great. That's very unexpected. Yeah.
Writing brings people together. Yeah. Dictionaries are the great uniters.
go.
Kory: There
Aven: that's fabulous. Okay, well let's launch into the book then. This most recent book. Maybe you can give us a quick description of it. We can focus in on the things that struck us about it afterwards, because I will admit that I think we were both a little bit surprised by exactly what the content of it was.
you know, I'd [00:04:00] heard in general, I know you, you were writing it for quite a while, so like in my head I I think I thought I knew what it was going to be and it wasn't quite that. And I think the subtitle is a bit, both more and less specific than the contents, if that's possible.
Kory: I think
Aven: Like it's more specific on some things than I think the book is, and it's less specific about other things than I think the book is. In your head, what is the book about and how do you wanna describe it?
Kory: The book is about the attempt to come up with a plain language. Way of defining color names specific to the third new international dictionary, Webster's third, about the difficulty of doing that and how difficult it is to get your mind in your hands and your language around color and some of the weird personalities.
I guess we'll say that were involved [00:05:00] in this particular work, which was only done for one dictionary. Even though I think it was intended to be a standard that would exist, into the future.
Aven: Okay. Yeah. So that touches on a couple of the points that in terms of more and less specific. So I'll just say that the more specific, the subtitle makes it sound like it's only about how to define the words, which certainly the book very much is about that. But, we were both struck by how much it was about more widely the history of the Mim Webster third
the dictionary in general.
And then the other part where the book is more specific than I maybe thought it would be. Was that part that it is just, just. That is too small. That's the wrong word. But
Kory: we have. Yeah.
Aven: It is specifically the story of that quest within the confines of the Mim Webster of and the third.
Yes. But in fact, you actually tell more than just the third there, because let me start at the beginning. Wait, [00:06:00] no, before that no, before that.
I know
Kory: See why
Aven: it's a bit of a problem.
Yeah.
Oh, I really do. But yeah, because I've been fascinated by color specifically for a long time in very particular ways.
And so my mind immediately thinks in the longer. Historical sense about the development of color terms, which was not, while you certainly touch on, goodness knows you touch on everything in this book, but it,
was not the focus of the book. So it, that's what I meant by both more and less specific.
Mm-hmm. You know, It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but it was a delightful surprise.
Marcie: Yes. I think it really needs to be said, when you hear that this is a book about the history of a dictionary, it doesn't quite convey how absolutely gripping the book is.
Kory: appreciate
Marcie: Yeah. Like I, I was, I felt like I was going into withdrawal whenever we weren't listening to it.
You you really needed to know what happened next.
Kory: I, I tried
Marcie: it's [00:07:00] such a compelling story.
Kory: it really is a compelling story and I think one of the things that so compelling to me about it was, Aven you touched on it like where do you begin? How do you start talking about terms and defining colors and the development of color? then you get into the personalities and all of the strange politics that go into dictionaries and go into color. And it was, this could have been like a five volume book. I'm very glad for my poor reader's sake that it's not, but I could have gone there. It was very, it was just such a full topic.
Aven: Yeah, we started listening to it on a drive down to Toronto. It's a four hour drive, and so we were listening to it in the car and we listened the whole way there with like almost no conversation. The much discussed, but I will not spoil it either. Twist happened as we like pulled into the house.
We were staying at maybe [00:08:00] five minutes before we, we got to the end of that chapter in the beginning of the next one, and then we had to turn it off. And as we were going to bed that night, Marcy was like, I, do you have time? Like we could we listen to a little more, just a little more before bed?
Kory: we
Aven: was like, no, I'm sorry. I have to go to,
Kory: what we were. Yes, I understand.
Aven: yeah. So yeah, that has not really happened to me very often, even with fiction books, I've gotta say. And that, so yeah, that was surprising. It was, we were not surprised that we found it a delightful book. We were surprised by the kind of book we founded. And I know, I'm being vague.
For those of you who haven't read, the listeners who have not read it yet it is a non-fiction book. The Twist is not some and then the Aliens arrived. It's not that.
Kory: No sad. Sadly, no
Aven: It is just,
Kory: book
Aven: yeah, there are events that build to what you think is going to be an obvious conclusion, and then events go in a different way as they do in life. But the way you write it is plays that up a little bit to a, to good effect. I think [00:09:00] so, yeah. Lots of fun.
Marcie: Yes. And also very funny.
So be prepared to giggle aloud
As
this book.
Kory: there's no denying that.
Aven: I'm sure I would've enjoyed it just as much on the page, but having you read it Yeah. Was, that was really special. Yeah.
Kory: you so much also for dealing with my absolutely terrible French. I did not think as I was writing this book that so much of color history happens in France and
Aven: Yes. Yeah.
Kory: is Not a language I can get my mouth around very easily,
Aven: yes. We've had, now the this is as we relaunch our podcast we've spoken to, as it turns out, three people with books about language just has been the people who we've contacted. And one was a book about the alphabet and one was a book about accents. And we talked to both of them.
And I'm sure you know which ones they are because they're on the tour on the tours right now. You're all going on the same podcast. But [00:10:00] they both talked, we've talked to both of them about the difference between the book and the audio book. For both of them, they have the flipped problems.
The alphabet is very visual, but then you're trying to express what they sound like. And that's hard on in writing, but easier about an audiobook. But then how do you describe. What hieroglyphics look like in writing. And then the other one was the accent, which is hard to convey in on in writing, but easier in when read.
But on the other hand, you need people who have the accents. Valerie got around that by hiring people with different accents to read different parts of the book, which is amazing.
Kory: Very good
Aven: Yeah. Different chapters are read by people with different accents. And then of course you are faced with the fact that you're talking about color the whole way through,
Kory: Yeah
Aven: so that's very visual.
However, you also don't have that much color in the book, so you.
Kory: don't it's pretty ironic. I in fact, a couple of friends of mine who got the book were like, did, [00:11:00] I, did I miss like a whole section in the middle that should have had more color plates. I said, no, there really just were, those five color plates. And they're like oh, huh. I, it does get to the point that there are ways to talk about color that are language based. The visual is also good, there's, for accessibility purposes, it's good to practice a little bit of what you're preaching
it, comes to talking about color language. Yeah. Yeah.
Marcie: And the dictionary in question had to make do with relatively few color plates devoted to color. Yeah.
So there you go.
Kory: Just two
Aven: Mm-hmm. I hadn't occurred to me until now, but so do you use color metric terms when doing the alt text for your social media posts? Because that would be amazing.
Kory: I don't,
Aven: A dark, strong,
Kory: right? A variable color [00:12:00] averaging No I don't
Aven: yeah.
Kory: those I stick with sort of the more deep pink or dark blue.
Aven: You have so many words you could use though. Where's the
uh, what is it, pink del
or,
yes, I,
Kory: Right
That was the thing that was so fascinating about going through all the color names in the third, that so many of these color names are just no longer in use,
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: which underscores the point that color names are also language, and language is always moving, and that includes, these ephemeral and sometimes fanciful names that back in the fifties when this dictionary is being written. People writing these definitions thought of course we're always gonna be talking about sea pink or to Althea or Oma, these colors that I'm just like,
don't know. I'm assuming that sea pink is a pink and rose to Althea is probably also, but oh, couldn't,
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: out a[00:13:00]
from the paint store if you said, get me the rose to Alsa one.
So
Aven: And a Loma is just complete. I wouldn't even know where to start.
Kory: a big blank box with nothing in it. Yep. Exactly.
Aven: Okay. I have so many things I wanna ask you about, but let me start with so because what you were writing was in many ways a history. Rather than a technical guide to defining color, for instance. the whole way through. I was just wanted to ask you about the research process and about the sources and what you were using, because it's amazing, right?
All of this incredibly detailed memoing. I hope to God never to work in a place that memos me that
Kory: know.
Aven: and that has such precise minutes from meetings because I,
Kory: Exactly.
Aven: very precise records extensive correspondence, personal correspondence and diaries and like just a wealth of stuff. So also, [00:14:00] no wonder it took as long as it did because you had so much to go through.
But tell us about the sources, like where they came from, how you got access to them. Just talk to me about your research.
Kory: So it began really with a set of letters in the Merriam Webster corporate archive. So Merriam Webster, as a dictionary company really loves its paper and doesn't throw anything away ever. So it has, an entire basement that's full of letters to and from people who are reading the dictionary or people who are defining, or people who have questions or, William Sapphire, just all sorts of letters.
And the first time that I ran into these definitions in the third. third is a dictionary that every Merriam Webster Lexicographer can spot from a thousand miles away. So you're trained in the style of the third. And these definitions were so [00:15:00] weird, I just thought, oh, they are so weird. And I couldn't figure out who wrote them. It was clear to me they had a system it was clear that someone had thought through it, but it did not have the hallmarks of any of the sort of editorial work on the third. I happened to find a letter, one letter from the color correspondent in a big file. And then I found the whole cache of letters and just began reading through them. And the color correspondent, he was a color scientist, his name was I. H. Godlove. Was a Renaissance band in terms of color. He was absolutely a scientist. He was a physical scientist, but he was an artist. He was a writer really was interested in of defining. So that started things. so in addition to the [00:16:00] letters, Merriam Webster also keeps all of the notes for all of the definitions in all of the dictionaries that they've published. so I can go through and, as Godlove is talking about a Loma, let's say, I can then go to the where all of the definitions and the production notes are kept and look at the notes for a Loma. So that gave me some of the first batch of research. But as I'm reading, Godloves letters. It's clear there are more people involved in this whole process soup to nuts than I had realized. And so it was these, concentric circles outward then, so then from this cache of correspondence, then it became, there was an academic group called the Inter Society Color Council was doing this work.
So let's see if they have archives. In fact, they do have archives. So finding [00:17:00] that, and then all of the members of the ISCC who are all involved in different parts of this color work. And so it just kept going out and out. then I realized at a certain point that I. H. Godlove. personal papers that were not deposited in any libraries. I was in libraries all over the country looking at
Aven: Right.
Kory: person's papers and I. H. Godlove had family papers that were held by family members. And through a connection at the Inner Society Color Council, I actually got in contact with I. H. Godloves grandchildren, who had a whole bunch of family papers. So then I'm contacting some person who does not know me from any person. I'm like, hi, I am writing a book about your grandpa, and I understand you have papers. And I would love to read, just, would
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: some my house to do that, [00:18:00] but these very lovely people did. so that was the cache of correspondence that. Was the meat, of the research. But in order to understand why Godloves work was so important and why this was such a revolutionary thing, then I'm also having to do research in color science, which I am not a scientist. And that was really complex information to deal with.
So now I'm dealing with the color metric section from the National Bureau of Standards. And I'm reading about color science and spectro photometry, I can't even say it. Color imagery. I'm I'm reading about all of this complex stuff. And then I'm also reading all of this history because the history of color science and the development of this particular way of talking about color is so deeply tied to. What's going on historically in the US and in the world. So it really, I ended up acquiring, [00:19:00] I don't even know, probably hundreds of books for the, this project and, which I love, my office space is, it just looks like a rabbit's warren at this point, just between all of these little stacks of books. But it was, so substantial to try and sort through all these things, and I'm I'm sure there's still stuff that I couldn't get to or that might flesh out more of this sort of long story. But, I got through what I could get through, but I did a quick count of. The number of pieces of paper that I took pictures of or scanned in archives, it's over 10,000 pieces of paper. Just, yeah.
an entire drive that's just devoted scans for this book. So a lot, it's just a lot of research.
Marcie: It's remarkable that the Godlove family did save those papers.
Kory: I know,
Marcie: it, that's the sort of thing that, within a couple of generations [00:20:00] often get
of.
Kory: So fascinating too because I, it made me think the grandchildren understood who I. H. Godlove was, and I think that's why they kept some of these papers. it was also, it just made me think about how many people are there who do. Phenomenal, interesting work who have all of these, ideas and notes that just once they pass away once they move and decide they don't want 'em anymore.
We, we think of these things as so ephemeral, and yet those notes that the family kept were the glue that enabled me to tie a bunch of pieces of this story together that otherwise I wouldn't have been able to.
Aven: Yeah, it's such a difficult balance that we all face in our lives of do you hold onto papers, do you, or, and now digital files, and how much of an effort do you do? And it feels like such a weight, I think around all that. There's lots of people saying, oh, you don't wanna pass these on to your kids and make them deal with [00:21:00] it.
My, this is an aside, but my mom is a poet in Canada and she's, she's published, I don't know, 25, 30 books. She she's not Margaret Atwood, but she's. Got a body of work and has known important people and done good work and things. And right now they're trying to figure out what to do.
They're trying to, move someone else into their home as well. So what do you do with all the stuff? And she's been keeping papers since her early days, starting the first feminist literary magazine in Canada, in,
Kory: Yeah
Aven: And she's got all these papers and we're faced with that problem of, I think they're important.
I think she's an important person, but also there are boxes and boxes of papers and they're organized to some extent, but they're not completely filed. Does an archive want them? Archives have to think about their space. And we've had, so in fact, her papers are going to library.
Fortunately we're in Ottawa, so that's a helpful thing. We have the library and archives of Canada here. We've got more resources maybe than some places. So her papers are in fact. Going to go [00:22:00] somewhere as a phone? Is that what it's Yeah, it's called a fond or phone one when collection.
Kory: Yep
Aven: But she also has all these poetry books that she's bought from her friends and collected over the years. Literally two, 3000 of them. 'cause they're all very thin
Kory: right If
Aven: she could not,
like
Kory: more
Aven: these small books you can get a lot of yeah. I know. She was like, it's only two, three bookshelves.
And I'm like, yeah, but mom, each book. But that she wasn't able to find anyone who wanted that because, they just wasn't able to. And so she's send, they're going off to be, to use bookstores and things, as a collection it was interesting and useful,
Kory: Right
Aven: not quite interesting. Anyway, so that's, that really is a tangent.
It's just that really made me think of this struggle she's going through right now. And again, she's of that level where. And I'm not in any way trying to suggest that she's not an important person, but she's not important enough for it to be obvious that of course we would keep her stuff for generations.
Un the but that doesn't mean that in 20 years [00:23:00] somebody wouldn't be interested in her correspondence with other poets around the country.
Kory: Yeah
Aven: community. And there could easily be someone who'd be interested in writing a book about something about the League of Canadian poets or something, which he was president of for, who might be interested in the work.
It?
Kory: Yeah
Aven: not gonna write that book, so anyway, so it just makes me think of that, like that question of what his grandchildren did,
Kory: Yeah. And it, and so interesting too that I think one of the things that's fascinating about a family archive that's really different from, an accessioned archive or a formal archive
That there's not a clear sense of why things were kept apart from an oral history of why things were kept.
In fact, a bunch of the things that were kept were things like condolence letters or invitations which,
From a scholarly point of view, people would go, eh, who cares? But those things were actually so important to [00:24:00] me, in part because it tells a story of I. H. Godlove and his family and his wife, and the kind of community they had. that was actually, those things were the most important things. Not any of his manuscripts, not any of the It really was these very personal notes that were really kept for sentimental reasons and. No other reason. Yeah, it spawned a bunch of conversations in my own family about when I kick off, do not go through my desk drawer and just start selling things.
Or don't publish. If you find something it's not done, don't publish it. Please. You know These sorts of weird conversations that I'm sure my
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: are like,
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: mom.
Yeah.
Marcie: One of the things that, your research really reminded me of personally having worked as a graduate student at the dictionary of old English, is how much the files are really the heart of a dictionary office. And there's that [00:25:00] incredible history of, how approaches have changed over the years.
Kory: Yeah And it is so fascinating 'cause I think that's something that people who work in dictionary companies take. For granted that, you know of course you just got all these old bits of paper around but it really is, dictionaries are a material object, even if they're online. That materiality of all those slips, all of those notes, someone's handwriting in a moment or little asides, really, those are the things that help put the humanity into a dictionary. And it, at Merriam Webster, you know it's I mean the amount of stuff in the building is overwhelming.
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: card
which are so they're each about four and a half feet tall. They are three feet deep they are. I wanna say about 20 feet long. and they take up half the [00:26:00] editorial floor, which is not in a small floor. you know and that's just the stuff that hasn't been digitized or isn't a native digital object. But that kind of stuff is, so each of those slips contains a micro history of a single word in the dictionary and in the language and what people were thinking about that word in the thirties or the forties, or the fifties, or the eighties, or the nineties, or the 1890s.
It's just, there's so much richness to it. And it really is this I don't wanna say it's better than the dictionary, but it adds a human dimension to the dictionary that I think folks that just, you know. I look upwards, occasionally, have no idea the kinds of thought that goes into just a simple, what they conceive of as a very simple definition.
Marcie: Yeah, and it sort of worries me that, a lot of this materiality will be lost as things become more digital. Like when [00:27:00] I arrived at, as a student working at the DOE, limitizing was putting, all the slips into the right literal file folder. And by the time I left I was using the new Limitizing software to assign words to the right head word.
And so a lot of that kind of. All you get is the end product. You don't get the in between the decision making little notes and things.
Kory: And I that's something I've talked to friends who are archivists and librarians about as well, which is the decision making is really important. But it's also think we in our modern age tend to think of digital files as much more accessible, but in fact they're not, it's, anyone
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: a piece of
no matter how old it is.
And if you can read cursive for instance, then you can read stuff back 300 years. I have, floppy discs that are only
Aven: Yep.
Kory: years old that
[00:28:00] longer be read. And,
yeah, there is something about a physical archive that. That just, it contains a little bit more history and it's so much more accessible, even though there are the problems of, who has access to that archive and can you get to that archive?
Marcie: So what does Merrim Webster, the company think about this book? This you're very forthcoming about the history of the company and the people in particular who worked there.
Aven: It's
not all positive necessarily.
Kory: I haven't been sued yet, so I'm assuming they think it's fine. Yeah, I think it's, one of the things I think that's so interesting about, especially Webster's third is is a very important dictionary in both, the history of North American dictionaries and in terms of. cultural understanding of what words are and what words mean. And so there is a mythology that's been built up around Webster's [00:29:00] third, and there is a mythology about, for instance, the editor in chief, whose name is Philip Babcock Gove, being this, hard driving, brilliant man. And that, that is true.
He was very hard driving and he was very smart. But it also is a dictionary, is a group project. It's not even the dictionaries that just have one person's name on them, like Samuel Johnson's dictionary. It was not entirely Samuel Johnson's work from beginning to end that led to that. Book. He had assistance and he had editors, and he got notes from other people.
And The same with the third. So what's interesting to me is that the third is, so it really is held up as this sort of, I say in the book it's an old man in the sea narrative, right? Like it's one guy out in a boat wrangling the English language Yeah. Strapping it to his hole and coming into shore and it's just not, no dictionary is like that.
They're all [00:30:00] group projects and they're all shaped by a number of different people. Even if you can't, read through the staff masthead and say, oh, that person contributed to this particular thing, they are group projects. And it was the same with the third. A lot of the things that were attributed to gov. We're actually thought of by other people, and it just, gov got the credit because Gov was the big name on the masthead and not the smaller name on the masthead.
Aven: And I guess there's been, as you alluded to right at the beginning, there's been other books about the history of the third. It's not like Merriam Webster as a company, has not faced the discussion and controversy or,
around it. So I imagine it's, you haven't I don't want to promise people an uncovered skeletons.
That's not exactly what was going on.
Kory: very
Aven: not the twist. But,
Kory: No. Yeah.
Aven: But but it was interesting to think because, obviously you are [00:31:00] accessing and using their records to tell the story, and there were moments in it, not many, but there were moments where I thought. Did they know she was going to say this about them when they gave her this access?
I can't really see that it would do Merriam Webster any harm.
It's publicity. It's not in any way,
Kory: yeah
Aven: but
Kory: and
it's about a period of history that ends,
Aven: yes.
Kory: before
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: the people
work at the company were born, so I think
Aven: Yes.
Kory: Yeah,
Aven: Sure. And I'm glad that they did not feel any worries about it because it's a wonderful story.
it's good.
Kory: It
Aven: It was just, it did cross my mind a couple of times.
Kory: Yeah I get it. I get it.
Marcie: So the third Miriam Western General, not just the third edition, but, it's always sought to be authoritative, but what that means has changed over the years. From the second to the third and beyond, how would you characterize that [00:32:00] change in relation to color words or, even more generally?
Kory: I, so I think there was a shift between the second and the third. So the second came out in 1934, and the third came out in 1961, and there was a shift in approach that I think a huge impact on people's understanding of the dictionary as an authority. So prior to the third. So for the second, and for most of the history of English dictionaries. Before that, particularly in the modern age, you had a lot of I don't wanna say snobbishness, but it does, it was, the dictionary was a didactic tool. It was used in schools and so when you had a dictionary inter word, it was the best practices of English. Generally speaking, especially these big general use dictionaries like the second or the third, [00:33:00] or any of its descendants, use dictionary would have vocabulary that you need and it would explain to you how educated users of English use this word And it would do so in sort of a if not a conversational style, then sort of a like professorial, fussy, tweed jacket, leather elbow patches kind of style. Lots of quotes from Shakespeare and Pope and Dryden, that kind of thing. The third was meant to be a dictionary for the modern age, and particularly a dictionary that followed sort of the modern push in linguistics towards structuralism.
So this sense that we can describe very dispassionately and very consistently formulaically how all of these meanings relate to each other. And that really was a gian. That was Philip babcock gov. [00:34:00] Bringing that sensibility to the third that we want the third to capture as much of the language as possible.
It's going to use more linguistic language when describing words. So instead of saying, for instance, that Irregardless is illiterate and uneducated, both labels that were used in the second, it would instead just say it's non-standard English, which, okay, like that is true. when people are wanting you to say, oh no, Irregardless is uneducated, then non-standard doesn't communicate that to someone who's not a linguist. So the third was very dispassionate. It was meant to be very objective. The defining style is. So dry and so so boring. It really is. a dictionary that will put you to sleep. And I say that as someone who, I'm speaking to two people who probably would [00:35:00] read dictionaries for fun, and this is one that would
Aven: Oh yes.
Kory: Yeah but the way that the third did that conveyed to people, and this was actually played up by critics of the third, that you can't be objective about language and that's not what people want.
want you as an authority to say, this is good, this is bad. Use this, don't use this.
They don't want you to say, this is a word that doesn't appear in any of the standard dialects of a American English. doesn't mean anything to people. What does that mean? Can I use it in my book report or not? How do I use this? And a lot of the ways that the third was criticized specifically had to do with the idea that they were entering more slang.
They were quoting more normal users of the language. So less Dryden, less Shakespeare. They quoted Mickey Spillane and they quoted Polly Adler notoriously, who was a very [00:36:00] famous So brothel keeper. And there was a big, outcry that this is not what an authority should be doing. An authority really should be looking at the best practices of English. what's fascinating is that Merriam Webster never really backed down from that stance. Until really recently, I wouldn't say that it's no longer trying to be objective, my experience, particularly at the end of my time there, was that we were sort of abandoning a little bit of the very formal ways of talking about words in favor of some more plain language and longer explanations.
So instead of just one label and a small usage paragraph, you might get a label and a much longer usage paragraph that would talk about, that regardless is in fact common in some of the dialects of spoken English. But [00:37:00] you use it in writing, people will make assumptions about your education level and, but it has a long history. It's very interesting 'cause I think that there's, not necessarily that there's been a swing away from trying to very dispassionately and objectively describe language, but I think there's an understanding that we ourselves are users of language. And so we bring our own, we bring our own biases, we bring our own sense of appropriate, what's not appropriate to
the language with us.
And one of the things that's great about being lexicographers, you get to see a whole lot of the language in use. And that's really exciting. And you're also given tools to help parse that and to help dive into the history of that language. And so why would you not want to. sort of Meet people where they are as opposed to demanding that people come meet you on this [00:38:00] high linguistic ground that very few people can. So it's interesting because I think that the idea of the dictionary as an authority is still very much the same in most people's minds, right? I think that a modern reader of a dictionary today would have a lot in common with a dictionary consultant of a hundred years ago. But the way that the dictionary is conveying that sense of authority and the way the dictionary is giving guidance has changed dramatically.
Aven: Yeah. Probably shouldn't get into the full dictionary wars discussion about IV and, but some people got real mad. Yeah.
Kory: They
Aven: touch on it obviously towards the end, but
Kory: real mad They did get real
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: It's true.
Aven: But that is perhaps a story for another conversation. I think we did talk a little bit about that actually when we talked about the a HD Yeah.
You and I, when the new edition came out. We, Marcy and I did do talk about that a bit. Speaking of that though, the book, I don't wanna say takes. tangents 'cause that's not correct. But while it [00:39:00] loops in your concentric circles, many other facets of what's going on in the world and the history of color and a bunch of other stuff in terms of talking about other dictionaries and the, this question of definitions.
You do talk a bit about the a HD,
Kory: I do
Aven: And, sorry, the American Heritage Dictionary, sorry, which comes about after the third. And because of it, but also you don't talk a lot about other approaches to color defining perhaps because you wanted it not to be four volumes long.
Kory: that's most mostly it.
95% of why. yeah,
Aven: I understand.
I understand that. But but I imagine you have thought about it. So what are some of the other approaches to handling. Color word definitions, like obviously there's the OED, which has a very different approach to what it considers itself to be doing as a historical dictionary. have you looked at all at how other languages define, there's a million questions one could ask about this how other dictionaries do it, and here's the million dollar question, which you may decide you [00:40:00] don't wanna even try to answer.
How do you think one should define color words? What would be the best way to do it? Because while the story you tell is fascinating, I would not say that at the end of it, the conclusion is a resounding success
Kory: I Defining color words.
So I think we can start with what are other ways of defining
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: words start with English because it's the language that I'm fluent in. you know it's important to note that lot of dictionaries enter comparatively few names compared to the third.
The third has about 3000 color names a little over that. And
is a lot. Yeah.
Even other unabridged dictionaries don't enter nearly as many because we just don't have many color names that. Really consistent use [00:41:00] historically across a long period of time, color names change notoriously actually all the time.
We need to start by saying that the third is an outlier, not just in its defining style, but in the number of definitions it contains for color names. so with that said, there are lots of ways to define, color terms, and I think some of it depends on your audience. When I worked at Merriam-Webster, I worked on for children and dictionaries for adults who are learning English as a foreign language
Aven: Right?
Kory: color names. For those two groups is really different than doing color names for scientists, let's say.
Aven: Right.
Kory: so you can define by analogy. So blue is the color of the clear sky. Red is the color of blood. is the color of the flower. [00:42:00] Lilac is the color. The pinkish purple of the flower, you can define by analogy. And weirdly enough any analogy is gonna be wrong in some way, right? Red is the color of blood. Sure. That is a red that is that, but that's not all the
Aven: And some blood. Yes. Not dried blood.
old blood. Yeah.
Kory: the color of the clear sky is gonna be a different color depending on the time of year and your altitude and where you are in terms of proximity to the equator.
There's all sorts of stuff that goes into that. But the thing that's fascinating about defining by analogy is we don't necessarily take the thing that we're pointing to. Literally, we do all kind of common speakers of a language have a canonical color or a canonical item in their brain. If I say to you, daffodil, [00:43:00] have a picture, a very particular picture of a flower that is yellow in your head, no matter daffodils, come in all sorts of different colors. You think oh, it's yellow,
Aven: Yeah.
Yeah.
Kory: So it has its pitfalls, but it is actually a really helpful way of doing things. It starts getting tricky when you get color terms that are, that don't have an analog natural world
Aven: or not an obvious one. Yeah. Yeah.
Kory: so I I note this in the book and it is one of my favorite names.
The color name duckling, which I naturally assumed was like a lovely lemon. Yellow is actually a deep saturated greenish blue, and I don't know why, because, because that's not the color of ducklings to me, that deep blue is not are canonically, fluffy little yellow balls of fluff. That's what [00:44:00] ducklings are. So defining by analogy, eh, iffy. If you are defining for a technical audience, then you can use all sorts of different things. You can talk about you can use any one of the nomenclature that scientists use when talking about color. So that can be everything from the percentage of, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black or red, green and blue. Depending on if you're printing or if you're dealing with light, you can find any one of the, there's, at least a dozen, if not a couple dozen ways of talking about and measuring color that have to do with, these specific systems that are closed systems, C Lab and C Love, and CXY, Z.
Like all of these things. can use that. And that mostly works for some technical audiences, [00:45:00] but not all technical audiences, because the reason there's so many of those systems is because different systems communicate different things. Then you have, you have the opposite problem with defining by analogy.
You've used something very precise and it doesn't work. Ways that we can define in English, and I think this is actually probably the only way we can do it, is to just be very vague. so we can use the what are called the basic color categories. We have 11 of those in English.
So that's red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple brown, pink, white, black and gray. And then a modifier that gets people in the right direction. So we know, for instance, that light and dark are opposite ends of a spectrum in color, and we know that dull and bright are opposite ends of [00:46:00] another spectrum.
So if I say something is bright pink dark blue, kind of you know it gives you
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: you a general neighborhood. The trick is, how do I tell you the difference between all of these bright pinks? Like, how do I say magenta and fuchsia are different bright pinks, or maybe they're not even bright pink to you.
We start getting into these weird.
colors too. Turquoise and teal are impossible to define satisfactorily because some people put them in blue and some people put them in green. And if you say that it's a greenish blue to a light bluish green, people lose their minds. 'cause it can't be both.
How can you say it's both? So yeah, so it gets
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: then in
of course you have a completely different way of dealing with it. I do language revitalization work with an [00:47:00] algonquian language, and that language has a whole bunch of standard, basic color terms, but the color term. That's most often used for, blue means both blue and green, some greens and some blues. But how do I communicate that to people whose primary language is English? Because it's not, makes sense in the indigenous worldview, but it doesn't make sense to English speakers. 'cause that's not how we think of color.
It's the same way if, we're dealing with Russian, which has two, two primary blues. Like, when I say blue to my Russian friends, I know that I have to like light blue or dark blue. Like we, we
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: game.
and then, and it's, and as Classicists and medievals, you'll also appreciate that, ancient Greek has at least two terms for blue. And they're not quite the blues that we have though. One of them is [00:48:00] the. Etymological, core of the word cyan, but
AOS is like it. It encompasses other blues that we don't necessarily think of as blue and Glaukos the same so it's really difficult to try and, languages can be closed systems, but we can translate between them. Translating color terms between language systems can be
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: difficult.
Aven: Yeah, no translation is really a huge pitfall on that one because you're trans, because you're translating not how people's brains work. Exactly. But I just want to be clear, I'm not saying that, but you are translating a whole set of cu cultural touchstones, right? Because the daffodil is only daffodil if you've seen daffodil.
Kory: Exactly Yeah,
Aven: So that just as a very basic thing. Apple wouldn't have meant, does apple mean green or red?
Kory: Yeah
Aven: very like really even really simple things. Mm-hmm. And that's what I imagine you get to with children your duckling point. Yeah. Ducklings a yellow. But in fact, I've seen a lot of [00:49:00] ducklings on TikTok recently.
People are really into duckling posting on TikTok at the moment, and a lot of them are dark colored because in fact a lot of ducklings and like mallards, the ducklings we see
river near us, their ducklings are. Dark brown, bluish green,
that's what they are. But, but I still think of ducklings as yellow because I've seen enough a, b, c books that have little ducklings in them as a child.
So that's fixed in my brain.
yeah. I know what they are. Yeah. So these things are things. Yeah. I did wanna bring that up because of course we, we did a whole series on words for color and Greek, Latin, and old English. and it's interesting when you talk about these ways of defining color not to say that when doesn't need to, but my head goes to, I don't really, if I'm a native speaker of a language or even not a native speaker of a language, but a speaker of the language who's gone past.
Very basic. I know what the basic color terms mean, right? Like realistically, a dictionary is almost never gonna be telling somebody for the first time[00:50:00]
red means. But not any kind of general usage term. So red doesn't need to be defined really, even though a dictionary was never gonna leave it out.
And then you would get into the big question of the 3000 other terms. But my head goes to well, I don't really care what hue or shade or saturation a color is. What I want my dictionary to tell me is, what's important about this color? So Scarlet, what are the associations of Scarlet? How is it used in a cultural sense?
What does it tell me about the thing? Of course, a dictionary is not gonna be able to tell me all of those
details.
Kory: Yeah.
Aven: that's asking a lot of a dictionary. But nonetheless I don't actually personally If a dictionary told me it's bright pink, I'd be like, okay, good.
That's all I need to know because really what I need to know is that bright pink has, oh, I know what the cultural associations of bright pink are. So if you can just tell me that this color word means bright pink, I don't care what bright pink it is, I need to know that, oh, it's gonna convey bubblegum and barbie [00:51:00] and femininity.
If it's post 1920, et cetera.
Kory: Yeah Yeah
Aven: Whereas but where it and all the way through the book, like the book was totally fascinating, but part of me the whole way through was but I don't, but I don't care. Why would I go to a dictionary? For what? For what shade? What precise shade Rose del is compared to that just is.
But what does matter to me when I go to my Greek dictionary? It tells me, okay, yes, Glauco and kuo s are two words for blue. What it does. Now, this is something you can do when you have a finite corpus. And this is a very huge difference between a classical dictionary and and a living language dictionary.
But what it does, it says of the sea,
Kory: right
Aven: what you know of the sea gray glucose of eyes gray, blue of dogs, grayish brown and it gives these restrictions, the definitions and it does that not just for color words. It does that all over the place because it it can say this word, [00:52:00] turns up 23 times and seven of them are in reference to this kind of a word.
And it, obviously that's impossible in English. But is that kind of an approach also potentially something that one could use for these emotive and culturally significant kinds of words, like color words
in English not in that restrictive way, but
Kory: as that, that word, that color term has a consistent sort of emotive
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: Yeah.
quality
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: that's really the trick is, I tend to agree with you, after having spent, a decade writing this dumb book and having written it, I don't know if we need a common. a common written language to convey every minute fine differentiation between different colors, because I think most of us, when we encounter [00:53:00] names that don't have a color chip with them, what we really wanna know is if I'm getting a blouse in am bru I would never buy a blouse, but if I were to be the kind of person who would buy a blouse and I, and it was an am brun, would just wanna know like that red?
Is that blue? Is that orange? What is that?
I don't think that I would want more than that. What's fascinating is that names, in the modern era, if they're not the basic color category or they're not color names. So color is named after things in the natural environment. They're almost always a marketing ploy and marketing changes all the time. So that's the thing that is really fascinating to me, is you have a handful of color names that are marketing terms really, that are pretty [00:54:00] consistent. But I also don't know, for instance, is someone really gonna want to know the difference between Claret and Burgundy? is it enough to just say they're both like dark reds? Isn't that, is that enough? And
Aven: Wine colored. We'll just.
Kory: Yeah Wine dark. They're wine dark. Yeah. But, you know it's interesting to think about how most of us are encounters with color names. Especially in the modern era, come with sort of a visual referent, right? I can say this pair of pants is in burgundy and there's only four colors of pants on the rack. And I know that one's white and that one's black and that one's gray. So this other one that's dark red must be burgundy. That's how most of us experience color names. what's fascinating is that it was so important for this group of people and this the whole sections of the government and whole sections industry and art to sort of say no [00:55:00] no no no.
When we say umber, it is really just referring to this color, which is different from raw
Aven: And only this color. Yeah.
Kory: or burnt umber this way. Or if I am manufacturing coatings for metal, when I say.
Navy blue, I'm referring specifically to this coating that has this property on metal and not
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: the dye, and not the colorant that you put in plastic. So it, it's so fascinating because somebody clearly felt a need for it enough that, dictionaries invested extensively, not just Merriam Webster, but as you said, American Heritage invested extensively in getting someone to come up with these fine colored distinctions in and to do it for hundreds, if not thousands of words. And yet like.
And what's [00:56:00] fascinating is that this is also inherent, I think, to a particular of dictionary making in America, which was the third was meant to be a dictionary pure language, the editors called it. there was also so much encyclopedic and sort of cultural information that snuck in because that's what under bridge dictionaries were for.
A hundred years
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: Love it was, I think for the second, was a marketing page that I ran across in an archive. was a picture of someone holding the second. A new international, which is difficult to do because it's enormous. It's about eight inches thick and it's, weighs 20 pounds.
And, but it's this line drawing of two hands holding second and it says, hold the sum of all human knowledge in your hands. And which is,
Aven: Right.
Kory: we think it,
have [00:57:00] access to the internet. We think that's ridiculous. But if people were gonna drop the equivalent of half a month's salary on a big book, then it better have all of the, the sum of human knowledge in between its covers. So there is this interesting sense where there was a drive to collect and categorize everything because we could, and we should,
Aven: It seems doable. Yeah.
Kory: that was happening in the broader culture as well. I talk in the book
Aven: Right?
Kory: This
scientific push to, measure, categorize, standardize and it wasn't just color.
It was everything. Like we, we wanted to get our mitts and our brains around every possible thing that we could. And so why not color? 200 years ago, the idea that we would know what kind of matter makes up [00:58:00] space was insane. But that, by this, by the sixties when the third came out oh. we have that technology. We could, even if we didn't know it, then we could figure it out eventually. Or the idea that we could see anything at the atomic scale was impossible. And now you know if you university and you take a college, science class, there's a chance that you'll get to see something on an atomic scale, every lecture.
So it's
so this idea that, if we can measure and quantify everything, why would we not do that? That would surely only benefit us. but also not really, you know what I mean Like yeah.
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: Yeah.
Marcie: And I guess, that's where the marketing people in the company, step in and just 'cause you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should do something.
Marcie: They're worried about what do we need to be able to say to sell copies of this Very expensive to make book.
Aven: [00:59:00] Mm-hmm.
Kory: And that, the marketing really was the downfall of the third in so many ways. And there are other better books about the marketing of the third and how it sort of fed this idea that had given up its position as the great teacher of America and was just kinda letting any old slop in. But there is this sense where you do have to find a way to take this very at heart, academic and intellectual and extremely, obstru and make it. Not just interesting to people, but attractive Right people. As you said, like it's not just that you want people to buy copies of this book, but you're also selling a book that everyone is going to buy exactly one copy of in their entire lifetime. So you gotta make it sound like it is the best thing since sliced bread and beyond. [01:00:00] So it is this fascinating juxtaposition of this intellectual exercise and the sale of something that is very intellectual and it mirrors a lot of what happens in color too.
People, scientists come up with a color and then marketers have to figure out okay, this is a very dull brown no one's gonna buy anything in this brown. But if we call it a Loma, that sounds like, ooh, that sounds like the old West and now maybe we can, you know it's are
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: And that's the really, the thing that is so fascinating to me is that, I can go through all 3000 of the color names in the third, for ones that don't have a core color term attached to them like Bremen Blue for something like a Loma, I don't, without even looking at the definition, I immediately have a sense of oh, a Loma sounds it sounds like the American Southwest in the 1940s.
Or, oh, it sounds like a Floridian, [01:01:00] seaside village for retirees, and there are colors I associate with that. Now. It's not the color. a Loma actually is, but that's okay. You know Like we have these really fascinating associations, just even with the sounds of words, which, marketers build on that.
Aven: Okay. I have about 70,000 other questions, but I don't wanna, I can talk. No. It's as many questions as there are
words. Yeah. Well, We'll close off in a moment, but I will just, this is also gonna be an aside one of the things I did not write my PhD dissertation on, because somebody else put out a book what I wanted to do was on the use of color terms in Latin poetry.
That was literally
Kory: yes
Aven: my dissertation. Like I got as far as a proposal before a book on color terms in Latin poetry came out. Now what she had done was just go through and basically do a catalog of which terms were we used in which books. But what I cared about was exactly what you're talking about, right?
Associative all the and senses of the of color because in fact. Latin [01:02:00] poetry is surprisingly unde descriptive. Like we think of poetry as being all about imagery, but it's really not very descriptive.
And in fact, they don't use color terms very often, especially in outside of Epic where you get your formula. But outside of that, it's really not that many. So it's like a surprisingly restricted number of color terms. And I feel that they all have, most of them have very strong.
Associations because of color is really important, but also the particular terms, whether, which word for black you use. One has, one means glossy black and has to do with interesting things. And the other one is a dead black and has to do with death, for instance.
Kory: Yeah
Aven: Anyway I, I never went down that road, but it's been something I've always been very interested in.
So just to give a little context to why I'm so excited about this book. Yeah.
Kory: turn to Marcy and you say, okay, but here's the thing about Ger and
Aven: Yeah,
Exactly.
Kory: yeah
Aven: yeah. Don't worry, she's had to hear me do all of this already. I can talk about purple for so long. [01:03:00] I used to some.
Yeah,
Kory: Yes Mm-hmm
Aven: my students, back when I used to teach sometime at some point in almost every course in medical course, somebody would say something about the word about purple or would come up in some context and I'd pause and I'd take a breath and I'd look at the class and I'd be like,
all right?
did it.
Here we go. 25 minutes on purple. Go have so much to say about its connotations and classical Roman thought and anyway, whatever. So yeah, all to say, I just this was to a large extent, given how much I've thought about color, entirely new information in this book, which was fabulous.
Kory: I had, I had a whole section on,
purple that I had to cut because, four different volumes
Aven: One does. Yeah.
Kory: The thing that's fascinating to me about, especially the core color terms is dictionaries really [01:04:00] until the late 18 hundreds in English dictionaries were just about including color terms.
But purple was one that got
Aven: just didn't, yeah.
Kory: included regularly because of its use in heraldry, but also defined so badly. Just like I I had a whole like. Long disquisition on how terrible people were at defining purple and how the definition of purple changed after mov was invented.
Mauve was
Aven: Yes. Yes. After an actual purple color. Yeah.
Kory: to, you know what I mean Yeah It's use in heraldry was the first time I ran into purple in a historical English dictionary, I was like, what the hell? That is not purple. You're describing red stop saying it's red.
Aven: Yeah. Well, Exactly. And that's the thing, right? The
blue, it's, it can also be a pure Yeah. When you go back to the dye. Anyway, we, yeah, [01:05:00] we, I won't, but
Kory: You could but you, yeah.
Aven: I could. No, it's good. Okay. Sorry. Let me pull this back on the rails as I wandered off my own little personal bug bear. But we'll end with the most obvious question, but also, hopefully fun.
Marcie: And I suppose this is really two questions really, but one, what's your favorite color and can you even have a favorite color when you've been dealing with literally thousands of colors and words for colors for so long?
Kory: So here's the funny thing I think all of us have favorite colors. Even if you're
do you say it? A fantastic
Aven: Aic?
Yes.
Kory: a person. Yeah. We all, we just all have,
Aven: Yeah.
Kory: visual and they cause a feeling in us.
We go, oh, I like that. So I have colors that I look at and I go, oh, I like that. But after doing [01:06:00] the book, that I like the most are actually colors whose names and definitions, the sound of the word and the definition do not match up at all in my brain. So duckling is one. I love duckling.
Aven: Mm-hmm
Kory: Dark, saturated colors too, but I just love, like duckling is a color that doesn't match the image in your head.
I love that. there's a primrose green that is a yellow. There's, lake, which can be a blue and also a red, so it's it has completely left the realm of sensation for me, which you know, is the whole point of color is it is a psychophysical sensation that you have, it has completely become the sound of the word and the connotation of the word, and how absolutely wrong [01:07:00] my sense of the sound and connotation are compared to its reality.
Aven: That's a perfect answer
for the book.
Kory: And purple, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Aven: Also have pressed purple. Yeah. they're almost essentially contra NIMS in a sense. But only because of the associations or whatever, and maybe idiosyncratic contra names.
Kory: yes That's a good way of putting it. Yes.
Aven: well, It's a very weird way of putting it, frankly, but
I'll go with,
Kory: You It's fine. It's
Aven: but we all understand it.
Kory: But a whole bunch of weird ways of putting things. So
Aven: Oh, this has been absolutely delightful. I cannot more strongly recommend a book than I recommend this to anyone. Oh, indeed. Anyone who would listen to our podcast will love it, adore this book. So please do find it. And also, I really strongly recommend the audiobook if you have the chance. Very good.
Kory: French.
Aven: Kory. Yeah.
all right. [01:08:00] We, I think there was only one word where I actually repeated it after you said it and went, huh?
Kory: I don't think so
Aven: oh, no. Okay. I get it. I, other than that, it was all fine. And I couldn't do, I couldn't do justices Spanish or German or anything. So we all have our, our limitations.
But where else can people find you and your work, Kory?
Kory: Can find me at my newly resurrected blog, which is cory stamper.com, and I occasionally post on Blue Sky and I occasionally tour the country with ridiculous slides about color.
Aven: I, there's no way anyone couldn't find you after that. It's very comprehensive
Kory: There you
Aven: this wander that wander the cities of America looking for.
Kory: Just on the side of the road, me and my projector and my computer, it's we'll,
ridiculous slides for money. Yeah.
Aven: well thank you so much. This has been absolutely delightful conversation
Kory: Thank you [01:09:00] for having me.
Aven: and in 12 years. I look forward to what the next one is.
Kory: I better get to writing then.
Aven: Yeah. bye.
Kory: guys. It was so good to talk to y'all.
Aven: For more information on this podcast, check out our website, www.alliterative.net, where you can find links to the videos, blog posts, sources, and credits, and all our contact info. And please check out our Patreon, where you can pledge to support this show and our video project. You can go directly to the videos at youtube.com/alliterative.
Our email is on the website, but the easiest way to get in touch with us is Twitter. I'm @AvenSarah, A-V-E-N-S-A-R-A-H. And I'm @Alliterative. To keep up with the podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcast app or to the feed on the website. And if you've enjoyed it, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
It helps us a lot. We'll be back soon with more musings about the connections around us. Thanks for listening. [01:10:00] Bye.