Okay. I have a friend who insisted to me that his car is brown when quite obviously to me, it is gray. As supporting evidence he offered up whatever color name the manufacturer gave it, and I was like, "I don't care. They can call it what they want, but it's gray." And then I really didn't give it any further thought.
Until yesterday. I have a newish purse which is a distressed gunmetal color, sort of a non-shiny silver. Last night, D asked me if I had an Altoid, and I told him they were in my bag, but that he'd have to dig for them, because they were probably at the bottom. So, my silver bag was inside my tote bag, and I could see him, from where I was, kind of cursorily look in the silver bag and then start looking in the tote. "No," I said, "they're in that silver bag. You just need to take some stuff out."
He looked at me, totally flummoxed. "What bag?"
"That one. The silver one. The smaller one."
He looked at me again, this time even more confused. "This one? That's not silver. That's brown."
Seriously, do men see gray/silver as a different color than women do? Does it all look brown to you guys? Or am I the one with a problem here?
xoxo
9 comments:
Interesting...
I think it's possible for some really severe cases of color-blindness to turn everything into shades of gray... but not shades of brown (so far as I know, unless what really colorblind people are seeing they call "brown" rather than gray). And that purse sure looked pretty silver to me.
My guess is, though, that if D was that severely colorblind, you'd know it by now!
I've heard of studies in cultures that don't have words for colors other than black and white, that when given words with examples and shown a wide range of colors, there's general consensus on what the best example of a certain color is, e.g. the primary example of red, green, and blue. Turns out that the consensus examples were close to the visual frequencies that the color receptors in the eyes are most sensitive to, so some colors really should have a generally accepted name. But I don't think brown is one of them.
Of course, I could insist that my car is navy blue... show me it's not (well, other than my lower sticker price).
The registry of motor vehicles insists that my car is brown. ;-)
And as I told you, Mr Barma, that'll come in *real* handy when you're fleeing from the scene of a crime, because all the witnesses will describe the vehicle as gray.
:-)
And, seriously? Are we trusting the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' judgment on anything? :-)
I will say, my purse is now on its side on the day bed, and at this angle and in this light, it does have a brownish tinge to it.
Not so much that anyone should look at their mother like she's insane when she calls it silver, however. :-PPPP
Maybe D has X-ray vision and he was actually looking at the leather underneath.
It sure looked awful silver to me (like, when I first saw it, I was thinking, "wow, that's a really silver handbag, don't remember seeing that one before")
I once volunteered for a research study at the Natick Labs, where they measured performance on a number of tests, including color differentiation, while under various forms of stress, e.g. heat, humidity, noise, cold, exercise, etc. Though it was intended to be double blind and all that, one of the guys running the scores felt that he had to tell me afterwards I was off the charts on the color differentiation. I may be deaf, but brown from gray I know. The army even says so.
Okay! I give! You win. Your car is brown. I can't fight the military.
:-)
Of course, considering what I've just suggested for qualifications, now I'm starting to see gray everywhere...
i was in the same situation! my girlfriend borrowed a sweater from me a while back and told me that she still had it. not remembering which she borrowed i asked her to describe it. she said "the brown one with yellow writting down the side". The only sweater i thought i owned with yellow writing was gray. When i went to get it i said "oh, i thought you said it was brown" which she replied with "it is brown". After a friendly argument we called her family in. Her mom and sister both looked at it and said that it was a brown sweater. I still think its gray. I even took a colourblindness test to make sure and scored a perfect 30/30. ..
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