NY missive no 192 - Steinway-Broadway walk and a "Nomenclature of Colors"

 

Screenshot from Pantone's
 introduction to its 2018 color of the year, "Ultra Violet"

One day this Summer CMH and I went to the Broadway post office in Astoria to mail a book to tía P. It was one of those spontaneous moments when it was just me and one of the boys (C and JNH were headed to the supermarket at the same time).

On the way, we passed the Hour Children thrift store on Steinway and resolved to check it out on our way back. CMH chatted about his process of writing an essay for school. Turning left along Broadway, we passed the library that has finally re-opened after a multi-year renovation - cue a brief reflection on why building projects take so long in this city - and passed another thrift store with books outside: that’s where a few years ago I’d come across a copy of architect's Daniel Libeskind's "Breaking Ground", just as I was beginning to obsess about all things "built environment". 

In the post office, the postal worker who helped us took an understandably long time typing in tía P’s address in the Swiss mountains. At another window was the postal worker who has been at that branch as long as I can remember, who keeps heroically calm during holiday rushes when the queue extends out the door.

On our way back, we went into Hour Children and tried out different sofas and chairs. 

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The book we were mailing to tía P was “Werners Nomenclature of Colors”. We had found it the previous weekend at the Cooper Hewitt design museum - the first time any of us had been (this has been an NYC Summer, and as we weren’t making it to visit P it seemed a perfect thing to send her, to have out on a table for guests at her mountain lodge to browse). Darwin used it to accurately describe colors of the places and creatures he came across while voyaging on the Beagle: blood red, leek green, snow white…

A lovely New Yorker article by Michelle Nijhuis gives more background on the book. The article includes insights from Tanya Kelley, a professor of languages at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, who says that the guide was one of many attempts in nineteenth century Europe to develop a standard way of describing colors: to bridge “word and world.” 

Now there are more mechanized systems to convey specific colors. (I remember being delighted when I discovered how simple it is to reproduce an exact shade with RGB or Hex codes). But Kelly argues that “language still matters, because it moves both the intellect and the emotions, often evoking qualities beyond hue”. 

For example, Homer described the Aegean Sea as “wine-dark” (oínopa). Scholars have come to think may have referred less to its color and more to the “movement of its water”, “shimmer of its surface” or to its depths. More recently Pantone’s 2018 color of the year was “18-3838 Ultra Violet”, which the company described as a “dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple shade” that evokes the “experimentation and non-conformity” of Prince, David Bowie, and Jimmy Hendrix.

I have to say, that the 2024 “color of the year” is much less inspiring: peach fuzz.