Ara… Welcome, indeed it has been a long time.(which is Ice to blame but this week she was my partner in crime so no punishment ok?) So today I’ll be straight to the point. (Btw, if you’re new to this blog please read the ”about us” page. Arigatou.) (This article is derived, summarized and put together from The Art Of Looking Sideways by Alan Fletcher.)
This was a scientific paper which debunked the myth that the Inuit (Eskimo) have a hundred or more words for snow- actually they have no more than the English do for rain. A similar misconception was propagated by William Gladstone, who thought Homer was colour blind because of his meagre use of colour words. Some ethnologists extended his conclusion to include the entire Greek population of that time. They were both wrong.
Names for colours enter language slowly. The ancient Greeks had no word for blue and even in the Middle Ages there was still no English word for orange. Chaucer referred to it as ‘bitwixe yellow and reed‘. Orange has always suffered an identity crisis. Today, although we can differentiate millions of shades, our vocabulary still only has about thirty colour words.
Colour words are acquired by cultures in strict sequence according to anthropologists who analysed 98 widely differing languages.
All languages have black and white.
If there are three words, the third is red.
If there are four, then it is green or yellow.
If five then whichever didn’t make four, yellow or green.
If six, it is blue.
If seven, it is brown.
If eight or more, then purple, pink, orange
and grey are added in order.
However, it’s not quite this neat. An African desert tribe has no word for green, but six for red. Italian has three words for blue: celeste, azzurro and blu. Swahili doesn’t have any, so coined bulu from English. Creek and Natchez Indians use the same name for yellow and green, as do the Highland Scots for blue and green. French has two words for brown: brun and marron, but there isn’t one in Chinese, Japanese, Welsh or (less surprisingly) Inuit. These, despite the hoax, do have at least seven words for white.
And a primitive tribe in the New Guinea Highlands still speak a black and white language and distinguish colours in terms of brightness.
Describing a colour in terms of something else has a long history. Homer wrote of ‘wine-dark’ seas, Romans called a particular blue from overseas, ultramarine, and a dye produced by whelk, purple (Porphyra). Take a herd of cows, feed them mango leaves, make a purée of the earth on which they’ve urinated day after day for months. Dry, refine, and you’ve got Indian yellow. Mummy (now unavailable) was brown produced from grinding up Egyptian corpses. Caput mortuum was a purplish-brown made of decomposed human brains. Puce is named after the supposed hue of a flea’s belly ( Latin pulex), and the blue of jeans ( bleu de Génes ) after a shade once associated with the city of Genoa. The dye magenta was invented in 1859 and named to commemorate the Battle of Magenta which occurred the same year. Crimson is derived from Sanscrit word for the bug which produced the dye – a krmi. Like many colour names turquoise is a semi-precious stone and although there is a proposal to call it grue – a combo of green and blue- I doubt it will catch on.
Paul Auster wrote a detective story populated with colourful people. The private detective is Blue who learned the tricks of the trade from Brown. White is a client who hires Blue to watch Black who lives on Orange Street. To pass the time while trailing suspects, Blue recalls cases he’s worked on in the past : the obsessions of Gold, the Gray case – who’d change his name to Green – the Redman affair, and an encounter he once had with a hooker called Violet. The names Auster picked for his protagonists weren’t arbitrary, they echo associations. For instance White is good , Black is bad, Gold is dodgy. Colours used as code names also occur in movies; The Taking of Pelham 123 and Reservoir Dogs come to mind…
WARNING: MANGA ARE READ FROM RIGHT TO LEFT, ”NOT” LEFT-TO RIGHT! Plus you may actually have to read the article to get the humor. You know what they say; You can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine.
Johannes Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg is believed to be the third son of wealthy parents, Friele and Else Gensfleich. Some have speculated his birth was illegimate since no official record of his birth exist, but I choose to say so what? Early in his career Gutenberg apprenticed as a gold smith. He learned metal working, engraving skills, and the arts of mirror making and decorating objects with precious stones. You may ask me why I call him Gutenberg and not Gensfleich. Well during this time he chose to drop his unflattering family name and took the name of the town of his mother’s birth, Burg Guttenberg. He was a talented young men who earned a decent name for himself in every city he visited but he was flawed when it came to the topic of money.
And ofcourse printing requires a …. what? A press! (God my readers are genius) Well, the machine had to be sturdy enough to withstand the weight of the platen and the type itself. Presses at the time were used to produce wine, cheese, and bailing paper. And a little information I desperately want to share with you beside the topice is that Gutenberg’s tax records show that he had a wine cellar in Strasbourg that contained 420 gallons. Not surprisingly, his printing press was a modification of wine presses in use that time: It was simply a large screw that lowered a weight onto a sheet of paper or parchment against a plate of inked type. This basic design remained the same until the invention of steam-powered presses about 250 years later. 
There was a man called Aldous Huxley, author of the novel Brave New World (already bought from amazon will tell you how it is soon) and other works of futuristic vision, detailed his efforts to teach himself how to see clearly in his 1942 work The Art Of Seeing. It should be known that Huxley suffered from a degenerative eye condition known as keratitis punctata from the age of 16. One eye was merely capable of light perception, and the other could only view an eye chart’s biggest letter from 10 feet away. In his book he described the physical exercises he used to overcome his handicap without the aid of glasses. However, his main idea is that seeing clearly is mostly result of thinking clearly. Huxley summed up his method for achieving clear vision with the formla: ‘’sensing plus selecting plus percieving equals seeing.’’ The first stage of clear vision is to sense. To sense, or look, simply means letting enough light enter your eyes so that you can see objects immediately around you.Sensing also depends on how well the many parts of the work. Obviously, a damaged or improperly functioning eye will hamper sensing. Think of the human visual process as a camera without film; that is, little mental processing occurs during the looking phase of visual perception. Huxley’s next stage is to select a particular element from a field of vision. Toselect is to isolate a specific part of the scene within the enormous frame of possibilities that sensing offers. That isolation is the result of the combination of the light gatheringand focusing properties of the eye with the higher level functions of the brain. Selecting is a conscious, intellectual act. When you select you engage more fully the objects in the scene than when you merely look. About seeing, Huxley wrote that ‘’ the more you know; the more you see.’’ A former baseball player watches and sees a baseball game much differently from someone who attends a game for the first time. The newcomer probably will miss signals from a manager, scoreboard details, the curve of the ball’s flight as it speeds from pitcher to batter, and many other details observed by the former player. The last stage in Huxley’s visual theory is to percieve; that is , you must try to make sense of what you select. If your mind has any chance of storing visual information for long-term retrieval and to increase your knowledge base, you must activey consider the meaning of what you see. You must concentrate on the subjects within a field of view with the intent of finding meaning and not simply as an act of observation, which demands much sharper mental activity. The more you know, the more you sense. The more you sense, the more you select. 
presented. So of course people were taken aback when Rikyu presented a new kind of tea room based on the prototype of a farmer’s hut of rough mud walls, thatched roof, and misshapen exposed wood structural elements. He created tiny tea huts (one and a half tatami mats, as opposed to the four-and-one-half- to eighteen-mat rooms that had been the norm) based on the traditional farmer’s hut of rough mud walls, a thatched roof, and organically shaped exposed wood structural elements. The hut included a nijiriguchi, a low entryway that forced guests to bow and experience humility as they entered. Rikyu made some of his own utensils of unlacquered bamboo (as common as crabgrass in Japan, but nowadays a Rikyu original is worth as much as a Leonardo da Vinci painting), and he arranged flowers simply and naturally in bamboo vases and baskets. Rikyu ’s ceremony became known as wabichado (chado means “the way of tea”), and it endures in Japan to this day. Unfortunately Rikyu’s turn toward simple, modest, and natural values was not well appreciated by his employers and in the long run ended with the order of Rikyu’s ritual suicide at the age of seventy. He is seen as the pioneer of wabi-sabi, his understanding of wabi-sabi from his death to this very day regarded as ‘’the codes of wabi-sabi’’… Ara I’ve been side-tracked in telling you of my favorite man in the history of Japan, so forgive me and I shall go back to the similarities.
