I published this week’s Dispatch! And then got back to working on the style guide blog post. I still had a paragraph to write about why some style guide creators should be interested in choosing nameable colors (”red, green, blue” instead if “olive, aubergine, grey green”).
A while ago, I talked with Justin Lind about that, and he recommend a lot of amazing papers to me – one of them being Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. The idea, and I quote: “categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks.” The authors of the study also write: “if two colors are called by the same name in a language, speakers of that language will judge the two colors to be more similar and will be more likely to confuse them in memory.”
That’s crazy! That means that if we have words for categories, we can better distinguish between them.
I mean, it makes sense. It’s easier to distinguish between Shitaake and brown button mushrooms if I have words for them. Or apples and pears. Or milk and cream. Or light blue and dark blue, which, in Russia, are two different words (there’s no word for general blue, according to the paper).
Still, crazy.