Product Colour Asa Consuming Jargon

I'm a computer scientist who does stuff with words. Which occasionally means I need to read those kind of ``linguistics for non-experts'' books to help me get by. I was reading about adjectives on Ely station the other day, waiting to go and see my PhD supervisor, when I came across something I found fascinating.

Many adjectives are defined in terms, if not of binary opposition, then of approximate synonym and antynym (similar-word and opposite-word). light is like featherweight and the opposite to heavy which is similar to weighty. Whilst enterprising french philosophers have made a world view out of this observation, I think that the strongest thing that someone vaguely scientific in intent can say is that these seem to be useful things to internally structure our notions of adjectives. Psychologists have done word association tests, asking people to say the first word that comes into their head when they're presented with another. Most common are synonyms and anynyms.

Let's take this meat with us, that humans as we tend to come across them like to structure things in terms of similarities and oppositions. Whether this relates to a fundemental essence of existence, language, literature, or whatever? -- let's leave Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Cixou to pick over those bones that remain.

The world doesn't fit neatly into these boxes. In things we come across only tangentially, then these abstractions are fine, they cover what we need to know, they're sufficient approximations, good enough. People who are specialists in a thing, be it quality of leather, cake mixtures, or beer, often need to reject these oppositions for the approximations they are. For them, in their specialist fields, the approximations are no longer good enough, they use descriptive overlapping, poorly contrasting adjectives. Look in a dictionary and you'll probably see this division. Basic adjectives coming in antonymic pairs, and specialist ones coming in a more complex messy arrangement.

Now, there's one field of basic vocabulary which doesn't fit this picture, colours. Colours are clearly basic, even as children we could probably name a dozen, in troublesome oppositions and similarities. Black and white are different, they seem to fit a pattern, lightness and darkness, and we can say whether one thing is lighter or darker than another, but is red opposing green, and yellow blue. Biologically, perhaps, but ask someone what the opposite of yellow is, would they say blue? or purple? or brown? It seems that, other than for white and black, colours are strangely in the specialist field of adjectives.

Now, work in the sixties found that pre-industrialised societies often have many of these terms missing, most fundemental are the basic opposition of black and white. They can distinguish colours as well as we can, 'what colour's this?' 'Kind of sun coloured but with a bit of grass colour', it's the fixed adjectives covering these notions that are absent. As a nation becomes industrialised it develops words for colours. How can this be explained?

'My proposal is' that colour adjectives are a specialism which is peculiar to the populations of industrial societies, like being able to drive, say. It's widespread but still a specialism for the mind attempting to encapsulate it. We have this complex set of words because we discuss these things often, need terminology, a jargon. Why do we need this specialism?

It seems intuitive to believe that in the field of cloth, weaving, and clothing colour terminology has reached it's most sophisticated and various, which is why I consider this to be its origin. In the development of dyed fabrics as commecrcial enterprises, names were needed for their retail. Eventually it seems that we becams so sophisticateed as consumers of colour that we needed a technical, but common, jargon to encapsulate our notions.

It cannot be, surely, that people hadn't seen these colours before dying developed, brightly coloured natural phenomena, particularly birds or berries say, have very bright and varied appearance. It would have been important for a hunter-gatherer to know the exact colour nature of the berries, in order to determine (for example) their toxicity. But the things themselves would have been directly present. It's not, I propose, the non-existence of colours which meant that no names need be given to them, but the lack of the need to communicate a notion of these colours other than by demonstration.

It was not when colours became available that the words were created it was, as with so many other things, when their nature need be considered in the absense of the thing itself, in an economic, trading, framework for colour, of which accurate language and specification is such an important compontent.

My proposal is that, for whatever reason, colour became important in the consumtion of certain goods (principally clothing), which caused a specialist vocabulary to be developed for the trading of these goods. That colours were somehow ameanable to this coining, and that it was a game that anyone could play, meant that colour discussion in turn caused further consumption sophisticaiton, and so on symbiotically, until we reach the stage of a highly sophisticated specialist colour vocabulary alongside a major consumer-choice axis of product color. Almost all products are now available in a number of colours, pads of paper, cars, even houses, and this seems far more significant than issues such as corner-beveling, or ellipse eccentricity which we could have chosen in its stead.

Colouring is something we do to consume, and colour vocabulary is how we discuss this consumption, and enable it to take place in a language-oriented, abstracted, economy. Subsidiary applications (such as signalling) grow out of this strangely acute specialist faculty.

One parting thought. Imagine a world without all this conspicuous consumption, where consuming was less acute a notion, where things were bought for you as was seen fit, a utilitarian place. What adjectives spring to mind? black & white? grey? monochrome? why is colour, in particular, seen to be what is absent, when what is absent is actually an economic activity? Are communist soviet-block or maoist parrots less brightly coloured than their capitalist partners? surely not in reality, but it's a powerful notion.

DanSheppard

Some history in the use of color might shed more light here. Frex, during the Middle Ages, most of the European cultures developed the notion of sumptuary laws governing the types of clothing allowable to certain social classes. This often included the colors - purple often being reserved for the Emperor, as an example, and I was told once of an Irish law restricting the commoners to wearing green, since 'they were as common as the grass'. So once color was used as a distinguishing mark, it became important to be able to have another color, similar but different, for the social climbers to use to assume the visual appearance of their superiors.

Also, the advent of easily-reproducible exact colors has a lot to do with it. --PeteHardie