Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

What’s more important, the thing or the name for the thing? I wonder if the distinction between blue and purple or lavender is more about the label we assign it than how we experience it.

In French, rose can mean both colors we call red and pink in English. They have one name for what we think of as two colors.

Russian speakers have two distinct words for blue, one for what we English speakers call navy blue, and another for light or pastel blue. They sometimes label colors we would typically think of as lavender into that pastel-blue named color, which by the way is also used as an anti-gay slur.

My mother worked as a chemist who specialized in designing pigments for the paint industry. She trained herself to recognize and label subtle differences in color very distinctly, otherwise she couldn’t have done her job very well. I think people in the fashion industry as well as visual artist probably train themselves in similar ways.

In our cultures, women are generally supposed to pay more attention to fashion and art than men are. Is it possible that phenomenon results in women being better trained at recognizing small distinctions in color?