Your responses to yesterday’s piece – in which I introduced KC’s fabulous Chingly Yorlin – really interested me.
In both the Ravelry group and newsletter comments, many of you suggested that you do not see Chingly as I do – as a greenish-grey – but as very definitely green.
Others described Chingly as sludgy, brown, or (rather memorably) as the colour of lichen on old gravestones (thank you, Eleanor). While few of you see Chingly as a the mercurial greenish-grey this shade appears to me, many of you agreed that this colour represented something of a challenge, because it seemed rather unusual. The whole discussion reminded me of an evocative Matthew Herbert track, which Tom and I enjoyed in the early ’00s because of its articulation of a particular colour-perception issue over which we’d often disagree: “you see green where I see grey”
Whether we see / name a colour as “green” or “grey” can depend on many factors: the physical mechanics of perception, our cultural heritage, our linguistic positioning, and (it is now increasingly clear) our age.
I thought a lot about how we see and describe grey when Felix and I were developing Colour At Work, and since writing the essay which is included in that book (“Grey Area”), I’ve continued to do so.
Grey is just one of those colours which, throughout history, has accrued an extraordinary amount of cultural baggage (a lot of it very negative) and which remains a concept over which humans routinely disagree. Is that shade blue or grey? Grey or green? Where does grey stop and green begin?
As grey is one of those shades which, for many of us it seems, perpetually hovers in an area of chromatic indeterminacy, you may be interested to know that, in some languages, it is among the first colours to be named.
In Old English, grœg (grey, grey-ish) is a basic colour term (or BCT) that appears in the language at an earlier date than blue (hœwen) and which is used in a wide variety of contexts in reference to everything from wolves and stones to stormy seas.*
Gren (grēne) is a BCT that precedes blue in the Old English language too: in reference to freshness or newness, to un-ripe or uncooked things, to glassy gemstones and to metals with a colourful patina, such as copper or brass. Grēne also frequently appears in Old English place names in association with landmarks, property boundaries, and objects in the natural world, such as paths, hills, and trees.
While grēne and grœg are both Old English BCTs, then, grey is also associated with a surprising number of non-basic, or secondary terms in this language such as hasu (a brown-ish grey which is used in reference to the plumage of many birds) and fealu (a pale, yellow-ish or red-ish-grey).
Grey and green (grár and grœn) are BCTs in Old Norse-Icelandic too, with grár possessing, as Kirsten Wolf puts it, “stability of reference across Old Norse-Icelandic texts spanning several centuries and across various types of vocabulary”
By the time of the very earliest literary documents in Old Norse-Icelandic, grár possesses, in Wolf’s words “a well-established achromatic meaning (without hue).” Her work shows how the development and consolidation of grar as one of the earliest Old Norse-Icelandic BCTs historically preceded that of grœnn (green).*
Fascinatingly, while grey is one of the earliest and well-documented colour terms in these northern languages, it is emphatically not so in those of the European south or east: in Latin, Greek, or Old East Slavik (Old Russian) grey is very low down in the list of early-documented shades.
My own linguistic parameters remain rather narrowly European, and I unfortunately know nothing about the development or consolidation of grey / green BCTs in Mandarin or Japanese, Urdu or Punjabi (perhaps speakers of these languages can enlighten us?). But I often find myself wondering just how far the long linguistic / cultural heritage of those of us who speak the modern European languages which arose out of Old English and Icelandic, Latin and Greek, affects the very particular ways in which we now see, describe, and understand rather blurry colour concepts such as “grey” and “green”.
Our blurry grey / green boundaries are further complicated by our physiology: some of us see colours very differently due to colour blindness (colour vision deficiency, CVD), an inherited genetic condition affecting one or more of the three types of colour-perceiving cone cells in the retina. New research into Aphantasia is also beginning to reveal the key role colour plays in the vividness (or otherwise) of our internal mental imagery. We all see (or don’t see) colour very differently!
Recent research is also shedding light on a phenomenon with which many of us may already be personally or anecdotally aware: that our perception of colour can alter, quite dramatically, as we age. The lenses in our eyes are affected by the progressive absorption of UV light over our lifetimes, becoming dimmer and more yellow as we age (a protective mechanism that preserves the retina). The sensitivity of the photoreceptors in the eyes of older adults are also affected, and in adults above the age of 70, the ability to perceive distinctions on the blue-violet end of the spectrum as well as the tonal distinctions between different types of pastels is progressively reduced. As one gardening book I recently read describes this phenomena, as we age, everything simply starts to look more green.
Tom recently painted our front and back doors in a colour which Farrow & Ball describe as “French Grey” but which, to my eye, is most definitely green in hue.
What do you think? Do I see green where you see grey? Or grey when you see green? I find the differences and specifics of colour perception really fascinating. These issues have so much to say, I think, about our shared linguistic and cultural inheritance as well as our individual experiences of simply being human. We should celebrate those experiences, and those differences! Hurrah for grey, green, and the many indeterminate shades of in-between!
*My discussion of of grey and green in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic draws heavily on Carole Biggham and Kirsten Wolf’s excellent A Cultural History of Colour in the Medieval Age, volume 2 in Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Colour series (2021; 2024)
Read more about history of colour in Colour at Work
Many of the beautiful green-grey photographs in this post are taken from Tom’s Ootlier projects Light Waves and Range
Join the colourful discussion in the KDD Ravelry Group!
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