Sam Dolbear writes at the indispensable Public Domain Review:
Go to your local DIY store and the paints will no doubt carry strange names: Tawny Day Lily, Meadow Mist, Candied Yam, Marshmallow Bunny, to name but a few. As Daniel Harris points out in Cabinet magazine, paint names developed their own poetic style and, like a certain tradition of lyric poetry they make reference to nature to express mood or atmosphere. Likewise, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour (first published in 1814) constructs a system or taxonomy for the classification of colour with reference to things in the natural world, (rather than to objects of everyday artifice, as with the work of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel). And though the goal is to primarily enable a scientific structure of identification, rather than evoke mood, the end product can’t help but veer to the poetic.
The book is based on the work of the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner who, in his 1774 book Treatise on the External Characters of Fossils (translated into English in 1805), developed a nomenclature of colours so as to offer a standard with which to describe the visual characteristics of minerals. Clearly taken by the idea, some three decades later the Scottish painter of flowers Patrick Syme amended and extended Werner’s system. In addition to the mineral referent, for each of Werner’s colours Syme added an example from the animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as providing an actual patch of colour on the page to accompany the words. While Werner found a suite of 79 tints enough for his geological purpose, now opened up to other realms of nature, Syme added 31 extra colours to bring the total to 110.
With Syme’s new reference categories there’s born a whole new world of relationships between disparate aspects of nature, encounters dictated solely by colour. For example, for “skimmed-milk white” we have the white of the human eyeballs (animal), the back of the petals of blue hepatica (vegetable), and common opal (mineral); for “lavender purple” we have “the light parts of spots of on the under wings of Peacock Butterfly” (animal), “dried lavender flowers” (vegetable), and “porcelain jasper” (mineral). Wonderfully odd monochrome tableaux are conjured: upon a crop of calamine a bed of straw in which sits a polar bear; or the style of an Orange Lily encrusted with Brazilian topaz and the eyes of the largest flesh fly.
Syme’s confidence in obscure references to the natural world came from an obsession with taxonomies at the time, a line developed from Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin (who made use of Werner’s Nomenclature on the Beagle). Such people often relied on a network of collectors and explorers, those obsessed with ordering and categorizing, pinning down butterflies and stuffing birds. In an age of mass digital reproduction, the pinning down of colour is perhaps as difficult as ever. It might be easier to turn to Pantone though, rather than Abraham Gottlob Werner.
The link was sent me by the indispensable Trevor Joyce; thanks, Trevor! (Speaking of whom, check out his new project, Possession, which begins “well here goes nothing and it’s not funny at all” and continues with a series of six-line stanzas that capture our present moment as well as anything I’ve seen.)
A crop of calamine? Oh, that’s “crop” as in outcrop, and Calamine (mineral), not calamine lotion. And the mineral article says “In mineralogy calamine is no longer considered a valid term. It has been replaced by smithsonite and hemimorphite in order to distinguish it from the pinkish mixture of zinc oxide (ZnO) and iron(III) oxide (Fe2O3) known as calamine lotion.”
Say, whatever happened to that book Kory Stamper was writing about color definitions? (She’s been working on that topic for a long time: see DEFINING COLORS here in 2012.) The internet says… True Color is out March 31! Here’s an excerpt, and she’s been doing podcasts and videos.
When poetics and allusions to nature fail to have desired or required specificity,
there is the graphic designers’ and printers’ resource, PMS. No. I refer to the Pantone Matching Ststem.
Hence the final line of the article, “It might be easier to turn to Pantone though, rather than Abraham Gottlob Werner.”
Other colour matching standards are RAL, NCS, CMYK, and RGB, all with their own primary domains.
I first read ‘calamine’ as ‘catamite’. That’s surely a better name for a mineral, while calamine should be an organic compound.
‘For example, for “skimmed-milk white” we have the white of the human eyeballs (animal), the back of the petals of blue hepatica (vegetable), and common opal (mineral)’
I’m not sure how good these descriptors are. Human eyeballs seem to have a range of colours, especially with extra red or yellow colours. The few underside views of blue hepatica petals I could find on the internet weren’t convincingly white. And common opal comes in a range of colours. I actually did my honours geology project around an Australian opal field. In a nearby area, there was an occurrence of common opal that was, in places, dark brown to black.
I often wonder about naming colours after things like fruit. I think of plum. Although as a colour it is described as dark brownish purple or reddish purple, the colours of plum fruits in shops cover a much wider range, including various shades of yellow, green, red, blue and black. And then the flesh can be a different colour too.
I find it interesting that both Goethe and A.G. Werner had such strong interests in geology and colour theory (maybe the two are connected by the various colours found in minerals?).
Here is an interesting link via basalts…
https://www.extinctblog.org/extinct/2024/10/7/more-basalt-more-problems
I first read ‘calamine’ as ‘catamite’.
I once saw in the display case of a deli Kalamata olives marked as “calamite olives”. For what it’s worth, that was on Castro Street in San Francisco.
Do read the addendum.
Interesting also that Gottlob got misinterpreted as Gottlieb for purposes of French translation… and a stark reminder that the grammar of Standard German has changed since Goethe – two lines in the poem are jarringly ungrammatical nowadays.
I have been trying to remember how we converted Pantone colors (selected from a book of cards) into CMYK for printing. There must have been a way we did it, but I just don’t remember.
You didn’t do “Looks about right”?
Wikipedia says there are official CMYK values for the majority of Pantone colors—70% as of 2000.
Thinking back (to around 2000), I think we may have only been able to use colors that had three-digit Pantone codes (as opposed to four-digit codes). We may have has a little piece of software that converted the proprietary codes into the correct CMYK values, and maybe we would have had to pay (or pay more) for the version that could handle the four-digit codes.
There’s a whole website devoted to reproducing the Syme book created by designer Nicholas Rougeux, where you can click for each color to see close-up photos of Syme’s exemplars — there are the eyes of the flesh fly, the orange lily, and the topaz for Brownish Orange, and likewise for all 110 colors. Amazing.
This is why Syme provided color patches (painted, not printed — color printing wasn’t good enough yet — and hand-pasted into the book) and paint-mixing instructions (“Skimmed-milk White, is snow white, mixed with a little Berlin blue and ash grey.”) Probably those would have been more useful to the reader as reference points.
One difference between Werner and Syme demonstrates the splitting of basic color terms over time: for Werner in 1774, orange, purple, and pink weren’t basic categories but subcategories of yellow, blue, and red respectively. But Syme in 1814 declared: “Werner, in his suites of colours, has left out the terms Purple and Orange, and given them under those of Blue and Yellow; but, with deference to Werner’s opinion, they certainly are as much entitled to the name of colours as green, grey, brown, or any other composition colour whatever, and in this work Orange and Purple are named, and arranged in distinct places.” Syme still has some pale pinks in his red category that I don’t think would be called red in English today, such as the Rose Red and Peach Blossom Red (check out the images at Nicholas Rougeux’s site).
Syme’s book is cited in the OED for six color names and one bird, pied woodpecker: “85. Aurora red. Vent coverts of pied wood-pecker.”
with deference to Werner’s opinion
So much simpler to say “pace Werner”!
At least brown was firmly established as a color – that wasn’t so a hundred years earlier!
How old is that usage actually? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it outside of publications by linguists – in the natural sciences we write contra a lot, but pace is unknown. (And the linguists never seem to write contra.)
There was a discussion of pace here once, some time about a thousand years ago.
Here is the old discussion of pace. The OED doesn’t have it until 1863, whereas contra is much older. However, both are used in a wide variety of contexts, although I think they have slightly different pragmatics. I rarely use either though, so my feeling for the difference is a bit inchoate. I just have the sense that contra expresses generally that something is different, while pace is more specifically, “with due respect to the previously stated views of….”
The OED cross-references the more elaborate expressions pace tanti viri and pace tanti viri dixerim, which go back a couple of centuries earlier in English.
Strangely, the OED1 didn’t enter pace, prep. in 1904, even though it was common enough that the Century (1895), Funk & Wagnalls (1908), and Merriam-Webster’s New International (1909) all included it. They didn’t exclude Latinisms in general, so maybe it was just an oversight?
I agree that there’s an actual cultural difference there. Exhibit B: historical linguists love to put “all remaining errors are, of course, my/our own” at the end of the acknowledgments; for my people it really does go without saying.
My favourite version of that came in the acknowledgments section of a joint work by two authors: “For all remaining errors, each of us blames the other.”
My feeling about pace is the same as Brett’s. In particular, I’d tend to use pace when saying that I myself don’t go along with an author (“pace Greenberg 1963, there is no convincing evidence that Mande is related to Volta-Congo”), but contra when talking about someone else (“Güldemann states that there is no convincing evidence that Mande is related to Volta-Congo, contra Greenberg 1963.”)
@DE’s usage matches mine (which likely comes as much from older humanities writing as linguistics specifically) – i’d gloss “pace” as “despite what X claims”, and can either introduce a rebuttal/refutation, assert that the claim isn’t worthy of response, or nod to a differing opinion that won’t be addressed at length.
To me, “pace” can have a passive-aggressive ring, as in “with all due respect (which evidently is not much)”.
definitely!
where the more 3rd-person “contra” is more reportorial and doesn’t necessarily agree with the contradictor.
thirded!
Yes, I too think all of that is correct. Pace implies that that pacefied person is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, and probably should really have known better given their undoubted eminence in other respects, whereas contra is quite neutral, at least in itself. (I’m sure it can be deployed more eristically with a bit of rhetorical skill.)
Let me just say that “contra mundum” is a common phrase while “pace mundum” seems (per a quick google) to be a quite rare bigram and does not necessarily involve the relevant sense of “pace.” Unless that relevant sense of “pace” takes a case for its object other than the accusative?
In my experience, “pace” is only used with people. And I do not share what seems to be the general sense that it is necessarily passive-aggressive; for me, it simply indicates disagreement.
Judging by pace tanti viri (dixerim), it would be pace mundi if it were actually a thing at all. Pace is the ablative of pax, not a preposition, at least, not in Latin, though I suppose you can call it one in English.
In yer actual Proper Latin you can use it with a possessive adjective too: hoc pace dicam tuā “by your leave, I’ll say …”, as well as Claudi pace loquar “with Claudius’ permission, I’ll say …” (both examples nicked from Lewis’ dictionary.)
I don’t think it’s grammatical to use it of a non-person. And classical Latin prose doesn’t go for personification in the way that English so readily does (hey, self-exemplification!)
“The English expect”, not “England expects.” (Kusaal is the same; I think it’s SAE that’s weird here, as so often.)
It would be nice if pace absorbed something of the sense of its Irish-via-Brythonic derivative póg: “with a kiss to Greenberg, there is no convincing evidence that Mande is related to Volta-Congo.”
On the other hand, “pace my arse” is probably never really going to catch on as an insult.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%B3g_mo_th%C3%B3in
(Also ungrammatical, if my previous comment is correct, unless you invoke one of the more disturbing anecdotes from Naked Lunch.)
The phrase “pro pace mundi” seems per google to have had some popularity with hippie peaceniks and now-defunct squadrons of the U.S. Air Force. But I don’t think that’s the specific usage of “pace” we’re interested in.
I agree on the reportorial tone of contra:
as opposed to authorial:
But what do I know. Nobody has yet offered me money to publish academically, or paid me to denigrate people.
Personification: “The Danish” would traditionally have been something like Det danske Folk, but that Austrian guy with the mustache skeeved that. We have parliamentary elections today (I just got back from voting), and after 3 weeks of xenophones getting equal time on The Radio I can with some confidence say that the preferred nominal form is now danskerne.
@de
The figure from English also would seem to be found in Latin, although the best example I could find is:
Ovid, Fasti I.644
causa, quod a patribus sumptis secesserat armis
volgus, et ipsa suas Roma timebat opes.
Yes, I said “prose” for a reason. Personification in Latin poetry is much commoner than in prose. In Latin, it’s a high-register trope, whereas in English it’s just business as usual.
Same in Kusaal as Latin prose:
Israel dimi da yi Egipt na
Israel people.NOMINALISER FAR.PAST emerge Egypt hither
“When Israel came out of Egypt”
The Vulgate actually has in exitu Israel de Aegypto here, but (a) translation and (b) it’s poetry. The original goes בְּצֵ֣את יִ֭שְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרָ֑יִם too, but of course Hebrew poetic style is very different from prose.
Kusaal doesn’t say “the bank will add interest to your account every six months.” Instead, you get (from Naden’s dictionary)
baŋk la dim na paasidi fʋ ligidi la nyɔɔd nwadis ayuobʋ wʋsa ni.
“the bank’s people will be adding to your money’s gain every six months”
Kusaal is much more typical of human language in general in this respect than English and other modern European languages are.
I agree on the reportorial tone of contra:
as opposed to authorial:
But what do I know. Nobody has yet offered me money to publish academically, or paid me to denigrate people.
Personification: “The Danish” would traditionally have been something like Det danske Folk, but that Austrian guy with the mustache skeeved that. We have parliamentary elections today (I just got back from voting), and after 3 weeks of xenophones getting equal time on The Radio I can with some confidence say that the preferred nominal form is now danskerne.
@de
A device/figure used in poetry is rarely altogether absent from prose; I suppose what you are saying is that this figure is generally avoided in prose. Here is a Latin prose quote(Lucan, Bellum Civile, 3.103ff):
—
Phoebea Palatia conplet turba patrum nullo cogendi iure senatus e latebris educta suis; non consule sacrae fulserunt sedes, non, proxima lege potestas, praetor adest, uacuaeque loco cessere curules.
omnia Caesar erat: priuatae curia uocis testis adest. sedere patres censere parati, si regnum, si templa sibi iugulumque senatus exiliumque petat. melius, quod plura iubere erubuit quam Roma pati.
—
The last two sentences use the figure for both “Rome” and “senate”. I suppose you could argue that “Rome” is not necessarily used to mean “the Roman people” here.
Lucan’s De bello civili is not prose. It’s an epic poem written in hexameters.
Ouch–retiring now.
Or as Lucan might have said: Heu, e campo recedo et aegre ulterius loquor.
i don’t think “pace” is always passive-agressive; to my ear, it can lend itself to that, but properly achieving the effect relies a lot on how it sits in its context. and it can certainly also work in a perfectly respectful way.
I agree, pace whoever said it was always passive-agressive or disrespectful. ETA: But I’ve probably seen it much less than others here. I don’t remember physicists using pace or contra or any formula for disagreement.
Physicists probably disdain the notion that people’s mere opinions about things are worthy of discussion. Just the facts, ma’am.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Friday
i don’t think “pace” is always passive-agressive; to my ear, it can lend itself to that, but properly achieving the effect relies a lot on how it sits in its context. and it can certainly also work in a perfectly respectful way
Yes, I agree. (Not that etymology is meaning, of course, but the Latin original also seems to be pretty respectful by default: “by X’s leave”, not “whatever X may say.”)
The first time I saw pace, I guessed it meant peace as in “sit down and be quiet for a minute, we all know your opinion, now let me have some space to expound mine”. But eventually I learned that it can be perfectly respectful.
https://languagehat.com/latin-for-a-candle/
also, if i have occasion to “pace” anyone soon, i hope i’ll remember to take DE’s advice and substitute “póg”!
nono, if anything, you or your institution offer the publishers money to publish your accepted manuscript. Even closed-access journals used to have page charges for length beyond a rather low limit.
You get nothing except an entry in your CV and eventually citations.