From Tangible Love to Faded Rhetoric

Okay, see if you can guess what these lists have in common.

List One:

•    Levitate

•    Barn Swallow

•    Carriage Ride

•    Hat Box

•    Close Out

•    Hard Work

•    Forbidden

No, not Broadway show tunes.  Try again.

List Two:

•    Calm Pacific

•    Admirable Child

•    Ministry

•    Favorite Pastime

•    Collective

•    Exclusively Yours

•    Spooky

No, not race horses, either.  One more try.

List Three:

•    Huggy Bear

•    Faded Rhetoric

•    Reverence

•    Tangible Love

•    Garden Gate

•    Thoreau

•    Thrill Seeker

By now, I'm sure that you have the correct answer, which is that they are the color names on test strips of True Value interior house paint.  Each color family is in order of saturation, from the lightest mix at the top to the most saturated at the bottom.

Oh, but what COLOR are these?  Well, List One is a grey-brown, List Two is a sage green, and List Three is blue with a little slate tinge.  But you can't sell paint if you call it "blue with a little slate tinge," and you can't sell paint if you call it 3184.  You've got to have the evocative, romantic names... even if they don't evoke any color image, nor are Close Out or Hat Box especially romantic.

Of these 21 color names, we have mostly nouns and adjectives, with only one verb (Levitate).  So here, free of charge, are the next generation of color names.

•    Senate's Despair — seemingly purple until looked at directly, at which point it turns red.

•    Frequent Flyer — the brushed aluminum grey of a beverage service cart.

•    Hidden Cop — a faint, smoky color evocative of sudden braking

•    Dean — whatever color the Provost wants it to be.

•    Road Rage — the brilliant red of Massachusetts license plate numbers

•    Namby Pamby — not white, but so pale you can't tell what its root color is

Someone makes their living writing this stuff, along with catalog copy that makes your pants seem like they deserve a trip to the Serengeti and your sheets were slept on by Marie Antoinette.

Here's a matching game for you to try.  Put this list of color names:

•    Chair Squeak — 

•    Compressor Motor —

•    Sound of Discontent — 

•    Fire Ant — 

•    Napkin Ring — 

•    Morning After —

•    Dark Underside —

•    Hue and Cry —

•    Cantilever — 

•    Oxymoron — 

•    Pregnant Pause —

•    Catapault — 

onto this list of colors:

•    Orange with a bit of tobacco-chew brown

•    Salmon filet left out in the summer sun

•    Shower grout mold

•    The approximation of black when the black cartridge is empty and the printer has to use only CMY

•    A cake left out in the rain

•    The copper stripe in the middle of a well-used quarter

•    A ten-day-old bruise

•    Blacklight posters

•    The last fire embers

•    The stain on Monica's blue dress

•    The skin under your watch where you don't get any sun

•    The rust of an abandoned pickup in Kansas

(Apropos of nothing, Nora was telling me about someone named Marie and she changed the accent as we sometimes do when we're in mid-sentence and a word doesn't come out quite right.  But all afternoon, I had a picture of Murray Antoinette...)