Evolution of colors and their names creatively explored

Over the holidays, a friend of mine was gifted two new baking pans — one red and one blue. “I’ll make a dessert in the blue one, maybe brownies,” he contemplated aloud. “And the red one is clearly meant for savory dishes, so I’ll make a lasagna with that one.” I stood by, listening, both amused and charmed by his matterof-fact assertions. Indeed, the marketing departments of fast food companies have applied these same rules of color psychology to whet the appetites of their customers for decades, with many chains opting for “savory” warm hues like red and yellow in their branding. The influence of colors can be as subliminal yet pervasive as the allure of the names we ascribe to them — think “mocha” vs “brown,” or “chartreuse” as opposed to something like, say, “bile.”

Dark, light, red

In 1969, researchers Brent Berlin and Paul Kay established a hierarchy to describe the various stages of basic color-naming as observed in different languages throughout the world. In the model, the first distinction made by each culture is that of dark and light. The next term to materialize was invariably for the color red. From here, basic