The names we give change what we perceive and how we act.
William Gladstone, an English Prime Minister obsessed with Homer, noticed something missing in the Odyssey—that the color blue was never mentioned. 1Instead things that we think of as blue, like maybe water or the sky, were described using every color but blue. Ex. a stormy sea was the “wine dark sea”.*
Then another linguist named Geiger studied the ancient languages—Chinese, the Vedic hymns, the Hebrew Bible, ancient Icelandic—and noted that none of these texts have the color blue in their earliest versions. The Egyptians were the exception.
Why?
The Egyptians had a word for the color blue because, unlike other ancient societies, they produced a blue dye from lotus plants. The hypothesis: when can use an item, we find a word for it. And we utilize what we have a name for.
An MIT study by Jonathan Winawer took this even further.2 He measured the time difference in identifying different shades of blue between Russian speakers and English speakers. The primary Russian speakers were significantly faster at differentiating between similar shades of blue.
Why?
In Russian, there are two different words for light blue and dark blue. In English, we differentiate the color blue with adjectives rather than with a different name.
This suggests that naming allows our minds to engage what we have named. We can perceive and act on reality by naming it.
What we have words for changes how we see. What we see changes what we have words for.
But it’s also a tricky game, this naming business. We can get ourselves all twisted up about reality if we are blinded by our constructed categories and titles, if linguistics is our measure for reality.
Take how light and colors work. Any blue thing is not blue but every color but blue. Light (in its particle/wave duality) contains all colors and as it hits an object, the colors are absorbed except for a color that is reflected into our retinas: the color we see when we look at an object.
Learning this in elementary school broke the world and it hurt. I raged with existential indignation. How could color not be an essential state of the world around me but an indication of its absence?
The real hang up was language. I’d been taught from infancy to say: “The leaves are green. The dog is brown. The water is blue.” The “to be” verb was accurate to our human perception but inaccurate to the real science of how it all worked.
Language and naming create and sustain illusions and delusions. To name amiss is to cause real harm.
It’s this tension of hubris-delusion-illumination-reality in Naming that I’m here to explore in these letters.
What I know about language + what that means for these letters
Language is both made and received. We can make new words. We can change old words. We can say old things and new things. We can understand how words change over time. We can question or embrace what is given to us. So these letters will do a hefty amount of both.
Language forms in dialogue. We learn speech through exchanges as young babies. We generate the very capacity through conversation. We don’t come up with words on our own. So let’s talk here.
Language is uniquely wired in our brains. Even people with a shared language differ in the associations and narratives that lurk behind each word. Your tree is not my tree. It makes communication tricky but also a generative practice. So these letters will exist from curiosity about how we speak and perceive (nerd term is postmodern theory of subjectivity).
Language is responsible for how we perceive and how we act. It’s serious work. So while I get sassy, I try not to be flippant.
What I believe about criticism
Because criticism is an important part of studying naming.
Good criticism takes the work seriously. It doesn’t treat it as a joke.
Good criticism pays attention. It gives itself to the world of the imagination.
Good criticism focuses on technique. I don't know what someone wanted to achieve when they made something. But I can see where it seems to trip itself up.
Good criticism hopes for the best. I really want things to be good. Both for me AND for the person who made the thing I'm criticizing. So I want to generously anticipate that things will be good!
Good criticism embraces potential. It illuminates the road to What Could Be.
Good criticism embraces humor. Taking something seriously doesn’t mean we can’t laugh when we find something ridiculous.
PS. I commit typos with abandon.
I really don’t care. Don’t bother pointing them out.
Radio Lab “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?” (2012)
Winawer, Jonathan “Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination” (2007)
Extras: https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2016/12/health/colorscope-blue/