transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] This is The Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, draw language like one of your French girls.

Speaker 2:
[00:10] We're back with a returning alumnianist who has been on a quest about lexicographers on a quest to define in dictionaries a pesky category of words, colors.

Speaker 1:
[00:22] So strap on your questing packs and remember snacks.

Speaker 2:
[00:25] Content note, this episode contains a couple of category B swears.

Speaker 1:
[00:30] People sometimes ask me, what are these categories?

Speaker 2:
[00:32] They are explained in episode four of this show, Detonating the Seabomb.

Speaker 1:
[00:38] Write down your pop feed. On with the show.

Speaker 2:
[00:47] Dictionaries historically have been very bad at talking about and defining colors. One of my favorite color definitions comes from Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, in which he defines pink as a color used by painters, which is like, sure.

Speaker 3:
[01:09] Thanks, Sarah.

Speaker 2:
[01:10] I mean, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[01:11] It's not wrong.

Speaker 2:
[01:12] Yeah, you're not wrong. It's just which of the colors, Sam. And historically, dictionaries only included two types of color names. They would include the basic colors. So in English, we have 11 of those. And those are the ones that you think of when you're thinking of like, a fifth graders box of crayons. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, gray, and brown, and pink, and black and white. That's kind of your basic colors. And then, there's something that's more what we call inherent color names, and that's a color name that's taken from a thing usually in nature. So lilac, we have a sense of that. Lime is one, daffodil. They would include those. And then, they would include a handful of very weird literary colors, or usually pigments. But it was really patchy. The color purple was really, I mean, it's a core color name, but it was so unevenly handled. It didn't appear in dictionaries, in all dictionaries, really, until the 20th century. So really, up until the 50s and 60s, when Webster's Third was being planned and written, colors did not get consistent treatment in any dictionary. I'm Kory Stamper, and I have just written a book called True Color, The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color from Azure to Zinc. How do you describe color in a consistent way without a visual aid? So no color chips, no paintings. How do you describe color in a way that makes sense to everybody who hears you describe it? So that all of you are picturing the same color at the same time. And that seems simple, and is actually really terrible. It's not simple, it is an eternal quest. The quest to define color goes on.

Speaker 3:
[03:13] Definitely doesn't sound like an impossible quest.

Speaker 4:
[03:16] Yeah, right.

Speaker 1:
[03:19] In The Allusionist, Valtz is an episode called The Authority, wherein Kory Stamper explained what it involves to be a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster dictionaries, a job she had for some two decades. She talks about all the decisions about which words are entered into the dictionary and all that goes into how they are defined. A lexicographer has to be meticulous, methodical and amenable to a multitude of minutiae. Kory's new book, True Color, is about the many people who spent years, sometimes decades of their lives, writing definitions of color names for the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Speaker 2:
[03:53] I got interested in this not through the color side of things, but through the language side of things.

Speaker 1:
[03:59] Of course.

Speaker 2:
[04:00] Of course. So in 2010, I was working for Merriam-Webster, which is a dictionary company, and they were revising their unabridged dictionary, which had first been published in 1961. It's called Webster's Third New International Dictionary. And they were finally putting it online. And one of my jobs was to go through and check and make sure that it rendered correctly online. You know, just comparing the page to the web page. And as I was doing that, I started finding these weird definitions for color names. They matched the style of a definition from the third, but they absolutely, they just were ridiculous. I think one of the first ones I ran into was a definition for begonia as a color term. It is a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral, bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William. Which, I recognize coral as a color.

Speaker 3:
[05:12] Oh yeah, I used to play tennis with average coral.

Speaker 2:
[05:16] Yeah, but yeah, it's just everything after deep pink is completely lost on me. And I thought, oh, well, that's kind of weird. But as I would review, I'd keep finding these definitions and they just got stranger and stranger and stranger. And they all had this same style where they would talk about a neighborhood for the color. So a deep pink, a vivid blue, things like that. And then they'd have these long explanations that would compare that color to other colors that I had never heard of before. So colors like Coppin or Rose de Althea or Josephine, Aloma. I have no idea what color any of these are. And I don't know why anyone thought these were common enough colors to use them as like orienting points. So I would actually, when I was sick of proofreading, I would pick up the third and I would just start looking for color terms and I kind of follow them through the dictionary. So I'd find one that used Rose de Althea in its definition. And then I'd go to Rose de Althea and see what that definition was. I kind of wend my way through the dictionary. So that's what got me started on this quest to see how these particular colors were defined this way. And I don't know who worked on them, which then led to me spending 12 years researching and writing a book about color defining. A fool's errand, but I got to the end of it.

Speaker 3:
[06:47] It's like you're a detective of other people who refused to give up. Any regrets? Do you ever wish you'd never seen Begonia?

Speaker 2:
[06:59] No. I mean, my only regret is that there's no interest in like a 17 volume series of works on this, because as with most things, you start pulling back a corner of the wallpaper and then you find all this stuff behind it. It really did feel like, well, in order to be able to define color, I need to be able to explain why you have to define it by using words at all. Why can't you just use color chips?

Speaker 3:
[07:32] Did you find any answers to that question?

Speaker 2:
[07:34] Primarily, color standards are expensive to print. Four-color printing really wasn't refined until the middle of the 20th century. But the other thing about defining color is color names themselves change. And so the same color name can be used of several different colors, depending on the field, the time, the application, or one color can have 20-some-odd names.

Speaker 3:
[08:06] You're making a case for paint chips, honestly.

Speaker 4:
[08:09] I know.

Speaker 2:
[08:11] Well, and yes.

Speaker 1:
[08:12] Sorry.

Speaker 2:
[08:13] No, it's true. It's true.

Speaker 3:
[08:16] In the period that your book concentrates on, which is several decades of the 20th century, you're accounting for dictionaries going from being like, why do you need all these color names, to this is very important. Why did it become suddenly expedient to do a better and thorough job of defining colors?

Speaker 2:
[08:37] Part of that was a change in how dictionaries approached scientific and technical vocabulary. There had always been an interest in including the latest and greatest science vocab in dictionaries. But really in the 20th century, there was such a scientific boom after both the World Wars, that it was almost impossible to not include scientific and technical vocabulary. The other thing was that that boom was actually spurred by a lot of research into science and technology that came about because of both of the World Wars. The US government, after World War I, poured the modern day equivalent of billions of dollars into color research. There was one year that the Congressional Appropriations for Research, color research, was the third most funded area.

Speaker 3:
[09:39] Why did they need to spend that much money on it?

Speaker 2:
[09:42] Prior to World War I, most of the dye stuffs used in the world were produced by Germany. Germany was kind of the place where physics and chemistry was applied. It was the place to be if you were a chemist. And so all of our dyes, all of our colorants, most of the time came from Germany. In World War I, there was a British blockade, so Germany could not export any of those dyes. And that was a huge issue because dyes made up a huge amount of the German economy. So the German Supreme Command kind of went to these state owned dye manufacturers and said, we got to find something different for you to do because we're shutting these down. And one scientist, under pressure from the Supreme Command, realized that you could take a really common byproduct of dye stuff manufacturer and weaponize it.

Speaker 4:
[10:41] Oh, yeah, great.

Speaker 2:
[10:44] Beautiful. So the first lethal chemical weapon used on the battlefield, which was chlorine gas, was made by dye stuff manufacturer. The second lethal chemical weapon, phosgene gas, which replaced chlorine gas, was also a byproduct of dye stuff manufacturer. So after World War I, when all of this came to light, America did not want to be caught on the back foot again technologically. So they poured tons of money into areas of scientific and technological research that they felt they needed to have to maintain world peace and national security. And because dyes had been weaponized, they reasoned that they needed to be able to understand as much as they could about the manufacture and storing and applications of color as possible. So they poured all of this money into color research. And in doing that, they actually created this whole commercial boom where suddenly, places like Dow and DuPont had all this money to research colors, dyes and paints and all these different colorants. So suddenly, in the 50s, you can buy metal kitchen cabinets that are teal and bright yellow and pink. And you can buy a car in 15 different colors. And you can buy hats and purses and pumps that match your car, right? Huge amounts of new and colorful things in the world. So the government in the 30s decided they were also going to help fund a way of standardizing all the colors used in art, science and industry, and how we describe those colors. In 1931, a group of member societies and member companies all got together to talk about, how do we solve these color description and color naming and color production problems that we're all running into? The National Bureau of Standards, which is a government agency, was heavily involved in this. This group became called the Intersociety Color Council. They're still around, by the way, if you want to join. Join and then you too can read about color science today. But the Intersociety Color Council decided the way forward was to come up with a color standard that would be the dictionary for anyone who works with, produces, uses a color. The ISCC and the National Bureau of Standards came up with this actually theoretically very elegant formula for how to adequately describe and define every color that they could. And it was beautiful. It was beautiful. And they distributed it and no one wanted to use it.

Speaker 3:
[13:55] No one wanted it.

Speaker 2:
[13:57] Because these are all proprietary formulas. You can't measure my color and say that it has this particular measurement, because that means anybody can now produce my color. So we have these two things colliding at the same time. We have this push towards scientism in the dictionary, and we have this huge government investment in color research and a push to standardize how we talk about color. And these two things meet in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Inside of Webster's Third, there are between 3,000 and 4,000 color names. Yeah. And that's just so many color names, too many. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[14:44] It does sound like too many. But then how many do you think is the appropriate amount?

Speaker 2:
[14:49] One of the scholars that I talked to for the book, ran a couple of experiments on what's the maximum number of color names that a person can come up with in five minutes. And there have been other people who have done similar studies that are not time bound. And those folks say that between 300 and 600 names is where people land for color names.

Speaker 3:
[15:15] That's impressive, I think.

Speaker 2:
[15:16] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[15:16] That's many.

Speaker 2:
[15:19] It is many, but is it enough? Because clearly, clearly we have enough evidence, or the particular group that wrote these definitions for the third thought that there was enough evidence to include over 3,000 colors.

Speaker 1:
[15:36] One of the reasons that there are so many color names listed in Webster's Third New International Dictionary is capitalism generating more and more names.

Speaker 2:
[15:46] In the 50s, it was really common for car companies to sell the same color year after year and just rename it every year so that buyers thought it was a new color. Because what are you going to do? You're going to run around the lot and compare it to, you know, well, in 1951, this was Coventry gray green, and now it's evergreen.

Speaker 3:
[16:06] I mean, who trusts their own eyes? I don't. Yeah. You also mentioned in the book that in such things as car paint marketing, people like to buy the same colors, but their emotions are stimulated by a new color name. Go with simple creatures.

Speaker 2:
[16:25] We are. This is the trick of marketing. If you have a, I don't know, a dusty pink dress, and you call it dusty pink, no one's going to buy that because that's dusty. And dusty in our mind means dirty. But if you call it Josephine, well, that's French. And that's very like, ooh la la. So words play on our emotions. Marketers use that to propel us into a purchase. And that reinforces our priors about what a word's connotations and register and feeling is.

Speaker 1:
[17:05] While florid and creative names like Average Coral or Josephine often did not help the dictionary user to understand which colour was being referred to, these problems weren't solved by definitions that skewed to scientific.

Speaker 2:
[17:20] And you get this especially with any colour named after a pigment, chromium green. What kind of green is that? Well, it's the green produced by chromium oxide under this particular reaction. It's like, okay, I'm not a scientist so I don't know. The basic colours, blue, red, green, yellow, those are a mess to define because how do you define them? In a way that makes scientists happy and is completely accurate, but in a way that means anything to anyone who is not a physicist. So, you can't say that blue is the colour produced by the sensation from the visual reception produced when the retina receives light that is 476 nanometers. I'm already lost, I don't care. You also can't necessarily define by analogy. You can't say, blue is the colour of the sky, because I, as I am sitting in my home office in a very rainy Philadelphia, the sky right now is mostly white. That's not blue. And you can't even say the clear sky, because in the summer where I am, it's so humid that the sky is also not quite a clear blue. It's not as blue as it is if I'm in Colorado, a mile up in the atmosphere, where there's very little air between me and outer space. And that blue is a totally different blue. You can't say that it is also the colour of water, because water is not actually blue. It's just sort of, we understand it as being canonically blue. So we start getting into all of these difficulties, where you can either be completely scientifically accurate or you can make sense. And there seems to be no in-between for certain colours. One of my favourite definitions that was submitted for Webster's Third was for purple, which the definer had just defined as a non-spectral colour, which raises so many questions for everybody. What's a non-spectral colour? What does that mean? But you know, it's completely scientifically accurate. Purple is a non-spectral colour. Yeah. Colour is difficult for even specialists to define. And that there still rages a little bit. What is colour? Scientists would say it is a psychophysical sensation. They would say objects do not have colour. Colour sits outside of an object, so the ball is not blue. The ball appears to be blue. Shut up, scientist. Yeah. And the thing that's fascinating to me is that the arguments that I was reading from the 1930s are still arguments being had today in colour science circles.

Speaker 3:
[20:32] Prioritising the information that promotes understanding. Is it that?

Speaker 2:
[20:38] Yeah. If you're a scientist and you want people to have an accurate understanding of colour, well, then is understanding is common understanding what you want to go for. There was a lot of ink spilled over the definition of the term primary colour in Webster's Third. Now, for people like me, slobs like me who are not colour specialists, when you hear primary colour, you think red, yellow, blue, because those are the primaries. A colour specialist would hear that and would let out a scream from deep within their soul. There's a lot of different primary colours. What kind of primaries are we talking about? We can just start with there's additive and subtractive primaries, that's what they call them, which are based on light or on pigment. The primaries, if you're dealing with light, are red, green and blue, because those are the wavelengths that our retinas are keyed to. If you're talking about painting or printing, then the primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow. If you're talking about colour theory, there are some colour theory systems that have four primary colours, there are some that have five primary colours, there are some that have six primary colours, and all that that means is that that's sort of a core colour within that colour theory system. But like, I just want to know what a primary colour is. And colour scientists would say, well, it can be a lot of different things, which is deeply unsatisfying to a lay person who just wants, I just want you to tell me what the primaries are. And so then we default to red, yellow and blue, because those are the primary colours that we talk about the most. So, okay. I mean, when I say primary colour, what do you think of?

Speaker 3:
[22:36] Well, you wouldn't be surprised by my answer, Kory. So let's not embarrass me.

Speaker 2:
[22:44] It is also my answer, Helen. We're all good.

Speaker 3:
[22:47] Wish I was more original.

Speaker 2:
[22:48] We're in the shit together.

Speaker 3:
[22:50] I suppose. Dear, I mean, why bother doing anything? It just all seems impossible.

Speaker 2:
[22:56] Right, it does.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 3:
[25:19] Color definition seems to have a lot in common with language in that it is emotional, it is perceptual, it is slippery, it's ever-changing and all of that.

Speaker 1:
[25:27] It's different to everybody.

Speaker 3:
[25:30] And yet dictionaries are trying to approach both with a particular precision. Maybe dictionaries are doing it wrong this whole time. Everything wrong.

Speaker 2:
[25:42] I mean, one thing that is really interesting to me as a lexicographer who cut her teeth on the third and the defining style of the third and this, you are an objective observer of language. You can bring none of your own biases, feelings. You are an editor in a jar, you are a brain in a jar to lexicography. That was the kind of lexicography I was trained in. That's a modern invention. Within the last 80 years, that's a modern invention. Prior to that, dictionaries were a didactic tool for a huge chunk of their existence. The idea that you could bring your own views and biases to a dictionary definition, that was just like, yeah, of course. That's why we're having you write one. People long for the objective, definitive, dispassionate description of what a word means and how to use a word, but that does not actually fit the way that words are used. So how do you, as a lexicographer, try to bridge that gap? But you can't really ever be objective about a thing that you live inside of and that you, you know, in which you live and move and have your being. And current lexicography is moving much more in the connotative description side of things that tends to get into the muck of subjectivity.

Speaker 3:
[27:11] Oh, muck.

Speaker 2:
[27:12] Then, yeah, muck. The murky swale of subjectivity.

Speaker 1:
[27:19] Speaking of muck, what an exciting digression into the word puke.

Speaker 2:
[27:23] I love this story. Puke, that's P-U-K-E, is a color name. And it is not the color name that you think it is. Puke was used in the 1500s, 1600s to refer to a reddish-brown color. And it was named after the color of sort of a fine woolen cloth. And it shows up in Shakespeare. It shows up in one of those great insult pylons that you see. And I think it's in Henry IV. Shakespeare talks about puke stocking. Which means you're wearing stockings made of this fine woolen cloth. The fine woolen cloth was always this sort of lovely reddish-brown color. And puke became associated with that color until the word puke became applied to effluvia or vomit.

Speaker 1:
[28:19] Fun fact, the first known appearance of puking in the vomit sense is in Shakespeare's play As You Like It. Puke the color of a fine woolen cloth and puke from puking are not related words etymologically. Didn't help puke the color name though.

Speaker 2:
[28:32] Use of puke as a color name dropped way off because now we're using it to refer to vomit. But the color name puke persisted. It became a different color. Now, if I'm saying that jacket is colored like puke, or that is a puke-colored jacket, most people are going to think it's a greenish-yellow, it's the color of bile because we associate the word puke now more with vomit than we do with this woolen cloth. When we use puke as a color name, it is a different color than it was in the 1600s.

Speaker 3:
[29:12] Democracy in action.

Speaker 4:
[29:14] Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[29:18] One color name that is particularly chaotic in meaning is pompadour. There are rumours that it is so-called after Madame de Pompadour, famous for the eponymous hairstyle and for being Louis XV's official mistress. It might be easier to get behind the unproven notions that the color was named for her favourite shade of pink if pompadour was not the name for several different colours.

Speaker 2:
[29:44] You had colour definers who would say, it's a green and everything in the files would say, nope, it's pink. But the colour expert is saying, nope, it's green.

Speaker 1:
[29:56] What?

Speaker 4:
[29:56] Help.

Speaker 2:
[29:58] So what is it? Is it pink or is it green?

Speaker 3:
[30:00] Or neither. Is it a third thing?

Speaker 2:
[30:02] Yeah. Right.

Speaker 3:
[30:05] What? How's this happening?

Speaker 2:
[30:07] The colour defining in the third was really trying to bring it in line with this government standard. If the government standard said that pompadour was a green and not a pink, well, I mean, that's what the standard says.

Speaker 3:
[30:21] That's what turns people libertarian.

Speaker 2:
[30:23] That's right. But this is also a period of time in the US, where government interference in things was pretty common. This dictionary is being written right after World War II, during McCarthyism, so, you know, the government's poking around and all sorts of stuff. We know, retrospectively now, that the government was also heavily censoring news about the Korean War and then any incursions into Vietnam. We know during World War II that the government was also censoring things because it was important that we not accidentally reveal war plans to the enemy. So government interference in things, it's happening. There's also a big drive in the government around this time, in the 40s and 50s, for efficiency. So suddenly, if the government's like, it's more efficient for us to have all of our school buses painted one color across the whole nation because we just need to source one color paint and we just give everyone the formula. Well, I mean, that seems innocuous to most people. So, there wasn't a whole lot of concern in the way that there would be now. And the government's saying, well, no, this color really should be green. Even though all of the fashion people and all of the paint people and all of the paper people say it's pink, we're not going to do that. We're going to say it's green.

Speaker 3:
[31:48] Hearing it laid out like that makes it seem all the more sinister. They're like, no, it's green. We will persist until you concede.

Speaker 2:
[31:57] Right. But what's funny is, so this happens in the 50s, right? Pompadour is green. If you pull up your phone and do an internet search for color chips, Pompadour, you will find they're all pink.

Speaker 3:
[32:17] Sorry to tell you, the first one that came up for me in Psychcolopedia was a sort of bluish gray.

Speaker 2:
[32:24] Oh, well, that's weird.

Speaker 3:
[32:26] Oh, God. Never mind.

Speaker 2:
[32:31] Yeah. Well, just don't use Pompadour. How about we do that?

Speaker 3:
[32:35] I've made it this far without...

Speaker 2:
[32:37] No one call any color Pompadour ever again.

Speaker 3:
[32:40] A runner that I really enjoyed in the book was you correcting the notion that because certain languages didn't have words that we would recognize as color words, that meant that they couldn't see the color. I remember studying the Odyssey when I was doing ancient Greek at school, and the sea is wine dark, and they're like, oh, but they can't see blue.

Speaker 1:
[33:02] The sea is only the color of wine.

Speaker 2:
[33:04] Right. Yeah. One of the things that's so fascinating to me about how we deal with color. From a linguistic standpoint, there are different ways to think about linguistic interactions between seeing something, recognizing that that thing is that thing, and then naming that thing. But we understand that the word that we name that thing is not the thing itself. We know that the word raccoon is not itself a raccoon. But when it comes to color, we don't do that. It's like blue is that thing right there, and if that thing is blue and you don't call that thing blue, then that doesn't exist.

Speaker 3:
[33:48] Why would we be like that?

Speaker 2:
[33:50] Well, we can blame many people for that. Cool.

Speaker 3:
[33:55] As long as there's someone to blame.

Speaker 2:
[33:56] So in the 1960s, there was a study done by a linguist and an anthropologist, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay. If you're a linguist, you know about Berlin and Kay in 1969. They basically did this survey of languages around the world, and they categorized which color names languages had. And they came up with a rubric that said, okay, this is how color words evolve as a language evolves. The first colors that every language has are black and white. The third color is always going to be red. The fourth color is either going to be blue or green. The fifth color is going to be whichever one of those it wasn't before. The sixth color is going to be yellow. And it keeps going. And I think there's eight levels. And they sort of released this and said, you know, we can prove or we show, our data shows, that this is consistent across all languages, in all language families around the globe.

Speaker 3:
[35:01] Yeah, they checked all of them.

Speaker 2:
[35:03] They checked all. Oh yeah, you know, all of them. Now, Berlin and K's initial study had some massive problems with it. The primary one being that it keys everything to English. English is the normative sample for them, which, yeah, like, guys, come on. And the way that Berlin and K was applied was in a way that was not this, oh, this is a really interesting linguistic phenomenon. It was sort of smashed into ideas of how evolved a people were, how sophisticated a people were. It was very Western, Eurocentric. And this is how you end up, then, with this idea that if there's not a word in a language that keys exactly to the English word for blue, then the speakers of that language can't see blue. That's why they don't have a word for it. And this is, it just, well, it's horseshit. So you brought up Homer and Greek and, you know, the wine dark seas and everyone, oh, my God, the ancient Greeks can't see blue. Of course, they could see blue. They actually had more blue color terms than we have. Homer was a poet. He can come up with whatever he wants to come up with when he's talking about the sea. Doesn't mean that he thinks the sea is red. So again, there's this very weird linguistic like brain thing that happens where we think that color names are the color themselves. That's why there's this very weird misapplication of Berlin and K and these very weird internet things that go around. You see them about once every 18 months where the ancient Greeks can't see blue, the Himba can't see blue, English people couldn't see orange until the 15th century when we got the word for orange.

Speaker 3:
[36:58] They had yellow, red before, they had it.

Speaker 2:
[37:02] And other colors too. They had Orpament, which is an orange. You have all sorts of colors for it.

Speaker 3:
[37:08] Why do you think people really want this to be true?

Speaker 2:
[37:12] I think because, well, when it comes to other cultures, I think we like to think that we are the normative culture, and we are the sophisticated culture. Though I will hasten to add that there are other languages that have more basic color terms than English, and they certainly don't seem to think that we're all ignorant slobs. Maybe they do.

Speaker 3:
[37:37] They could be laughing behind their hands, and fair enough.

Speaker 2:
[37:40] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[37:41] Yeah, right.

Speaker 2:
[37:42] Yeah, and I wouldn't blame them. Some of it is that, but some of it I think is this idea that language is so powerful that it can actually change the way that you see things. And the thing is, is that there's a little bit of truth to that, tiny bit of truth to that. We want language to be magical. The fact that we have all of these words, so many words that you can combine in any weird grouping, and somehow we all manage to communicate with one another does seem like magic. So why wouldn't it also change how we see the world around us?

Speaker 3:
[38:26] Sapir Worf would be delighted.

Speaker 2:
[38:30] Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3:
[38:32] They're out here checking. Still got it.

Speaker 4:
[38:34] Right. Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[38:39] In the linguistic sphere, in the 60s in particular, 50s and 60s, there was also a push for universal language, that we had to have some linguistic universals because language is a system, and systems are built on scaffolds, and scaffolds have to all look the same. There is this huge body of modern work that sort of pushes us to find the thing behind the thing. And, you know, humans love finding the thing behind the thing.

Speaker 1:
[39:12] Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and writer. Her new book is True Colour, the strange and spectacular quest to define colour from azeur to zinc pink. Find her and her work at korystamper.com. Inadvertently, I have been running a years-long dictionary study in the Allusionverse. Those who sign up to support the show at theallusionist.org/donateget to attend live streams wherein I read aloud for my large and ever-expanding collection of vintage dictionaries. We have dived into several dozen of them by now, and this project has really shown up how non-objective reference books are. Well, of course they're not, because humans wrote them. But reading them aloud somehow really brings out the personalities of the often highly opinionated and frequently grumpy-sounding humans who wrote them and their peculiarities and particular proclivities. For example, one lexicographer loves using the word pudend a lot. They use it a lot, while the rest of us have gone our whole lives using the word pudend never. Anyway, join me for this ongoing study, as well as behind-the-scenes info about every episode, TV and film watchalongs. You're in time for the back-end of Season 1 of the very funny Australian murder mystery Deadlock, and the company of the wholesome and supportive Allusionverse Discord community. It'd be nice to have you there, so come aboard at theallusionist.org/donate. Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is Imago, now. 1. Entomology, the final and fully developed adult stage of an insect. Psychoanalysis, an unconscious, idealised mental image of someone which influences a person's behaviour. Try using Imago in an email today. This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional character of the Musqueam, Squamish and Slowetooth nations. Music and editorial advice were provided by singer and composer Martin Austwick. Hear his songs via palebirdmusic.com and Bandcamp. And listen to us both on our long-running other podcast Answer Me This. Our ad partner is Multitude to sponsor this show, whereby I talk winningly and admiringly about your product or thing. Get in touch with them at multitudeshows.com/ads and we'll work something out. Find me on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and BlueSky at AllusionistShow. And you can listen to or read every episode. Get more information about all of them. See the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words. Browse a lexicon of every word featured in the show to find the episode it was in. And become a member of The Allusionist to support the show and get a bunch of perks. All at the show's forever home, theallusionist.org.