Maxus wrote:angelfromanotherpin wrote:Men frequently pretend to have a limited vocabulary of color so they won't be asked by their SO to play pretty princess dressup with their bathroom/wedding/whatever.
I actually have a limited vocabulary of color.
If you point out a teal Camaro to me, I will go "Ooh, nice blue-green there."
Not "Teal!"
Because 'blue-green' if the first thing that shows up in my head.
I know the words, they just aren't the first one which come to mind.
I think you're onto something.
When I was teaching my son colors, we used jelly beans. He would ask for some, but we wouldn't him any until he answered the question of "What color?"
While we were traveling, we couldn't always buy the same brand, so we'd pick up whatever jelly beans [without excessively disgusting ingredient lists] were available, and some of them weren't in basic colors, they were in pastels and neons (and all sorts of colors you wouldn't normally want to eat).
If he didn't know the word for the color, he either would never choose that type of jelly bean, or he'd lump it in with something he interpreted as close. Peach -> Pink. Teal -> Green (at first, green and blue were the same color to him, lumped under Blue). Salmon -> Orange.
Once you give him the words to use to describe the concept of X wavelength, though, he'll use it. And of course, the frequency that color is encountered will reinforce how well the term is remembered. Blue, red, green, black... Those colors are more common in boy's clothing than pink, peach, lavender, teal, magenta... So the words he encounters most will be the ones he remembers best.
I've seen this happen a lot with different people in a wide variety of subjects, from colors to local botany. And as long as something is good enough to get by, there's no real reason to invest more effort into more specific terms.
