Color Naming Quotes

I think they named the orange before the carrot.

My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow.

I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 - it was my nickname.

My favorite color is jungle green. At least, that's what it said on the side of my favorite crayon in first grade. I don't know if it's an official color.

I had no name for that particular hue of orange, other than unfortunate.