Colors

So here I was doing a word search puzzle, the title of it was "COLORS", it's interesting how much you can learn from a word search; I have found many words that I did not even know existed, today I have found what to me are the 6 most ridiculous color names.

1. Ashy... Really? Ashy? What the hell is the color ashy? I had to go and look this up cause it seriously does not even sound like a word to me and maybe that's because English is not really my first language but seriously ashy? Well, it turns out it is a damn color and maybe because I am a woman I should know what color that is well... no I seriously don't, I know shades and I will go with this is a different shade of red, or green, or brown, but I had no idea that each shade had a color name... so ashy, that color is apparently a pale grayish color.

2. Drab... drab is a dull light brown, apparently called drab because of a fabric that is made of that color, now again, this to me would just be a different shade of brown... in essence light brown... The more I think about this the more I realize how much easier it is to just generalize these colors, I feel bad for anyone that actually has to memorize them, the general population does not really know all these names and whoever does know them in order to use them they will actually have to be able to describe them....

3. Dun, this one is another shade of brown, mostly used to describe apparently the color of a kind of horse or a horse that has a particular gene called the dun gene... very interesting... again just another shade of brown with a new name...

4. Jet, this one is a shade of black... which is puzzling because to me black is black and there is not really shades of it, if you start giving me "shades of black" the black actually starts looking more like a dark shade of gray, but hey I did not invent all these color names...

5. Gilt, this is another name for gold, very straightforward since this is also use as the past tense of the word gild which means to coat with gold... however when did we start using verbs to describe colors? I guess some colors have more than one name, because gilt and gold are basically the same thing, there is not even a shade of difference based on what I've research so far...

6. Last but not least, and possibly the worst one of all... Vert! Vert!!! It's a shade of green by the way, no one could come up with anything better than Vert? and the reason I say this is because in Spanish green is verde, so basically all I see is the same word but take out the e and replace the d with a t, and I am pretty sure that vert is a word that might mean green in a different language but here... it's just another shade of green....

So here is the deal... after much thought I have come to the conclusion that human beings make things a lot more complicated than they need to be, I mean if you work with colors and what not, and you have to go ahead and show a specific shade of one color to someone then just show them the shade, now I understand that when you are trying to buy paint to say paint the walls in your house the people that sell the paint need to have a name for the paint you are looking for in which case I would preferably use numbers instead of making up names, and really when you are talking about colors even the shades of color change depending on who sells the paint, so it could have the same name but it will still look like a different shade... But then again that's just me... and maybe it's just my craziness that has me thinking of the ridiculousness of all of this... I mean gilt? really? vert? jet? I see the word jet and I think of a small airplane that maybe one day I will own... or not own depending on what I decide to do with my life...

Also, as a person that likes to paint and create all different things with different shades of colors before I get a whole bunch of creative people on my butt about how to them there are many different colors and they like each of them to have a name... let me tell you something, when I am making something I look at the shades of the colors, I don't look at the name, I look and focus on the particular color, not on its name...