Fritinancy

Any Color, As Long As It's Printable

General Motors, apparently not satisfied with a $30 billion government bailout, is asking U.S. citizens to chip in just one more tiny little thing: a color name for the new Chevy Volt, the world's first mass-produced extended-range electric vehicle.

From the photos, I'd say it looks silverish-greenish. But hey, we're Americans! We can do better!

So GM sponsored a contest (deadline was this morning, I regret to inform). And then Autopia, Wired.com's car blog, spread the word.

And the fun began.

Suffice it to say that Autopia's readers exibit little of the earnest enthusiasm of the official entrants. Compare the two sets of comments and judge for yourself.

My favorites: Lame Green, Data Gathering Blue Disguised As a Contest Green, and Socialist Red ("Darn right we should be able to name it we paid for it").

And special credit to Some Guy, who submitted "Can't Afford to Hire Our Own Marketing Firm Green" on the GM site.

Hat tip: Anthony Shore, who commented on LinkedIn: "It's a contest. What could possibly go wrong?"

Color Me Exhausted

I'd outlined a whole post about campaign rhetoric and the tautological fallacy, but you know what? It's been a rough week, and I have to prep for a debate party at my house. Time for naming fun instead! Here's a quiz to determine how well you know your paint-color names. (It's from Dulux, a paint manufacturer; all examples are from the Dulux inventory.)

My average score over several rounds was 50 percent ("You know your paints!"). But my spelling score was 100 percent. Someone really needs to copyedit this sucker. Caymen? Suprise? Russain? Labrabor? Good grief.

(Hat tip: Jan Freeman/The Word blog.)

Color Me Perplexed

TypePad, which hosts this blog and many others, gave some of us a not-altogether-welcome surprise present earlier this week: a brand-new editor for composing posts. I hadn't asked for it, I'm not wild about it, and I'm particularly annoyed that I had to discover it by accident and then stumble around trying to decipher it. (I tend to glaze over when presented with a clutter of icons. I'm a word person through and through.) It took me an irritatingly long time to find where they'd hidden three basic blogging functions--categories, posting status, and trackbacks. Yes, it's easier to include a hypertext link, but the rest of the interface is slow and kludgey, and for all the "upgrading," it's still not possible to import text from MSWord.

On the other hand: many, many new colors in the palette! One hundred forty-four! Why? No clue. I mean, we're not Leonardo here. Wouldn't Crayola's classic 64 colors have sufficed? Personally, I'd be satisfied with four (black, red, green, blue)--in exchange for faster keyboard response. 

But then I noticed that--unlike in the old Compose editor--each color had a name that revealed itself when I moused over it. Now you've got my attention.

I moused over all 144 colors and arrived at this conclusion: TypePad created the palette and then realized--uh-oh!--that the colors needed names. So they assigned a few colors at random to a few interns who'd been idling around the water cooler, and then uploaded the color names without cross-checking, consulting a dictionary, or indeed applying common sense.

Apparently some of the interns were not only unpaid, they were also color-blind.

Let's take a look, shall we? I boldfaced the color names for emphasis until I got weary of all the interface problems and just gave up.

Timberwolf, Asparagus, Mauvelous

Alice Boone of the blog Ben and Alice follows her interest in color names to the Crayola website:

Remember the Sesame Street trip to the crayon factory to make the orange red crayons? Well! Crayola retired orange red and replaced it with several other shades that approximate the color, but I remain nostalgic about the whole thing. There's even a color for that feeling: bittersweet, a pinker version of orange red (introduced in 1949).

With the exception of bittersweet, Crayola had been naming the colors descriptively until 1993, when they mounted a consumer campaign to name new colors with more whimsical appellations. There's some good ones: asparagus ("a green beyond greens"), macaroni and cheese, timberwolf, robin's egg blue, shamrock, tumbleweed, Granny Smith apple, wisteria. I think Purple Mountain's Majesty (Sen. Rick Santorum's favorite) and Tickle Me Pink may be a bit overstated. Also, mauvelous?

Pictured: Asparagus, from Crayola's current palette. Click on any name in the palette to learn that color's history and to read a "colorful story" about why it was selected.

'I'll Take One in Pig and One in Broccoli'

What color is your workout wear? If it comes from Lululemon Athletica, the Vancouver, BC-based clothing manufacturer, the hue may be called Jelly Fish, Flood, Stitch, Razzmatazz, Waterslide, Mildew, Portapottie, Garbage Bag, Rubber Ducky, Scab, or even--yes--Pig or Broccoli.

Evidently Lululemon's color genies ran out of creative juice when it came to naming Black, Hot Pink, White, Taupe, and Classic Sport Grey.

See the Lululemon color chart here. (Portapottie is a kelly green that looks on the chart to be very similar to Waterhose.)

By the way, I adore Lululemon's products--the best-designed, best-made workout wear I've ever owned--and I even kinda like the company's quirky manifesto. But those color names make me feel a bit green around the gills.