>> >> Color and language, both, fascinate me. > > **Same here. Me, too! Thanks Jane for bringing this up. And I totally agree that, even though I've loved colors and color-ology since I was a kid, mauve was one of the hardest color terms for me to get a grasp of. I'm still not sure I've got it, and what I think of most often as mauve isn't a very attractive color to me anyway, so I always wonder why anyone would use the term that often. Also, growing up bilingual (English and Spanish) and then during my college years spending a couple of years living in Japan, I've always also had a great interest in the similarities and differences between the everyday usage of the words in different languages. As Jane mentioned, it was a little difficult to get used to everything that was blue or green or in between being called blue in Japan (especially traffic lights!). However, they do have a word for green, but it tends to only be used for things that are what I would call a bright kelly green. I've never seen an actual set of RHS color charts. (I hear they are very expensive.) However, I did grow up with the 64-crayon box of Crayola crayons and the names they used have heavily influenced my English usage of color names. (Although for some reason they were fairly weak in the teal/cyan part of the color wheel. I had to learn about that when personal computers (with color monitors) and especially color printers came into common usage.) Jane, I could fairly easily find you about ten people each from Mexico, Argentina/Chile/Peru, and Japan to come up with what words they use to refer to various different colors if you can come up with either printouts or things of a constant color they all could find or know of in each of those places. --Lee Poulsen Pasadena area, California, USDA Zone 9-10