Nov., 1913 
A PRACTICAL SYSTEM OF COLOR DESIGNATION 
213 
readily understood the thought. But words not only symbolize experiences : they 
indicate relationships; they point out the way to other experiences. If they re- 
late themselves to common experience, they become intelligible, even though the 
experience connoted by the word itself is a new one. Words must either re- 
cord common experience, or point out the way to such experience, or remaui 
unintelligible. 
Now this is the trouble with color names, even those employed in Ridgway’s 
new Nomenclature of Color. They do not appeal to common experience. They 
are so recondite or so arbitrary, or so fanciful as to be incommunicable, save to 
specialists as highly trained as Ridgway himself. They are not only meaning- 
less to such as do not possess the “key,” they are so unrelated in thought that 
they can be found or re-found in the book itelf only by constant reference to the 
index. Thus, “Hermosa Pink” is in the red series ; “Bittersweet Pink” in the 
orange series; “Phlox Pink" in the violet series, etc. “Chatanay Pink" crops up 
in the gray-toned tint of Scarlet-red ; and “Tourmaline Pink” among the double- 
gray-toned tints of Rhodamine Purple. Pink does suggest redness, so that one 
does not need to hunt outside of the twelve hues between Violet-Red and Red- 
Orange ; but here are several hundred possibilities ; and it will puzzle the student to 
find, save through the index, Patent Blue or Acetiii Blue or Corydalis Green or 
Mytho Green or Asphodel Green, even with the basic hue named outright. These 
names may be found to be exact when you have arrived, but there is nothing about 
them which points the way to the incjuirer. Such names do not appeal to common 
experience, and they contain only the smallest suggestions of relationship. 
It is quite conceivable that a student, preferably a younger one, should mem- 
orize this entire list, should master it so that he could recognize and name a color 
at sight ; but even so his report would be unintelligilile to any one else who had 
not similarly mastered this Chinese alphabet of color. He would still require 
color terms by which it would be possible to communicate his impressions to the 
general reader. 
If this is ever to be done the basic names of color nomenclature must be 
simplified in character and reduced to the lowest terms, and all other color name.'> 
must be so constructed as to point clearly to the nearest base. This is no easy mat- 
ter. Perhaps it cannot be done. Perhaps, however perfectly done, the public would 
not stand for it, any more than thev would have stood for Volapiik or Esperanto 
or the other honest attempts to provide a universal language. But unless it is 
(lone, technical descriptions, as of bird plumage, couched in the color terms of the 
new key, will remain in sealed books. 
I have no such ideal system to propose. That is a matter which might well 
engage the profound attention of influential learned bodies. Doubtless, no one 
is more conscious of this fundamental requirement of color nomenclature thaii 
Hr. Ridgway himself, but he was too modest to advocate such a sweeping 
change. Nevertheless, he has pointed out one way, through the use of descrip- 
tive adjectives where established names were lacking — ideally in the case of 
Neutral Gray, whose successively diminishing tints are designated as light neu- 
tral gray, pale neutral gray, and pallid neutral gray ; and whose deepening shades 
are deep neutral gray, dark neutral gray, and dusky neutral gray. This .’suf- 
fices when we wish to refer to a norm only three points away, but it would break- 
down of sheer cnmbersomeness if we wished to refer back through successive 
gray dilutions to the normative hue. 
-But some way must be found around the difficulty — for thought, if not for 
printed description. Because of this necessity I am emboldened to describe my own 
