Colour Perception (and a request for help)

I did the thing.

 

Did the test.

 

Yeah, we have a Japanese maple in our yard and the color blends well enough that it doesn't bug me. Dark red is a thing I am fond of!

 

I can't do the test :(
Mind you, I'm blue/green colourblind, so idk if that would skew your results. For the record, the maple tree looks a lovely purple to me.

 

oh, sorry, i actually closed it because i was doing my analysis already; i should have posted that here. thank you for being willing to try it, though!

 

Woot! Excited to hear about your results. :)

 

i will post more detailed stuff tomorrow when i am more awake, but fyi y'all ruined my hypothesis. (i was expecting a difference in the types of adjectives you used to modify colours.) otoh it turned up something neat that i wasn't expecting at all.

quick terminology rundown: there are what are known as 'basic' colours; in english these are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, black, and white. essentially, you don't describe them as being part of another colour (in contrast, you might call ultramarine a dark shade of blue).

so, those of you who said you weren't foodies/into health food/interested in a broad range of foods were more likely to give basic colours (64% of the time) and less likely to use adjectives (light, dark, etc.) to modify them (19%). you were more likely than the foodies to use non-basic colours (10%).

those of you who said you were foodies/etc. still used basic colours a lot (50% of the time), but you liked your adjectives (29% of the time). not so much the non-basic colours (8%).

if a food was its 'typical' colour (like orange carrots) almost everyone described it as a basic colour.

given how wildly it threw off my stats, beige is probably actually a basic colour in english.

eridan purple is still my favourite colour description.

everyone who opted to describe the first eggplant as aubergine in colour was a foodie, which i had a snicker over and then probably would have ignored if not for the fact that 44% of you opted to call the second eggplant either lavender or lilac. after that i started sorting nouns-used-as-colours in their own group. if you were a foodie you were more likely to use nouns than non-basic colours, and if you weren't you favoured the non-basic colours over nouns.

oddly enough, the use of concrete nouns actually came up in a paper on wine-tasting language: people who considered themselves experts were more likely to use them, although according to the author the descriptions were super idiosyncratic and rarely matched up. so, looks like if you're into something you use different types of descriptions.

if you're curious about something in specific let me know!

 

Where are you from, @budgie? I'm pretty sure aubergine is just also the word for eggplant in the UK.

 

canadian, from southern ontario. around here (at least in english) aubergine is generally used to mean the colour rather than "an eggplant", which led to me reading that question/answer set as (essentially) "what colour is the eggplant?" "it's the colour of an eggplant"

(there was also a carrot orange for the carrots and a couple pea greens for the peas, which were equally amusing to me)

 

I will admit to calling the first eggplant aubergine and I also giggled about it

 

i think i was tempted to call one (or both) of the eggplants "eggplant" (not even the fancy word, just literally "eggplant") but then i was like, "really, me? really?" and described the colour differently. not entirely sure but i think that happened.

 

yeah eggplants are called 'aubergines' here in germany so it's kind of an 'orange orange' situation for me but i literally had no other fitting word. eggplants have a special black-purply color that has its own name for a reason

 

A lot of our colors in english at least are named after a thing tht has that color; i get what youre saying but like. I think lavender is different from carrot orange, if that makes sense?

Your results are super interesting though! Thts cool to find out, so thanks for doing all this. :)

 

@Lissiel yep, it makes sense! i actually made a note in my paper that the disproportionate use of 'lavender' meant that people probably consider it a colour moreso than a noun (at least in this context).

it was interesting to see all the nouns people chose for colours; "eggshell" is a pretty typical noun to use for off-white, but i've never seen "very white coffee brown" before.

 

some of my favourite answers:

- everyone who added how pretty they found a particular veg
- conversely, everyone who told me how messed up they found the kumato/the white pepper
- everyone who added question marks

and of course, the reigning champion,

this was kind of an exhausting project; i wound up with over a thousand data points to sort and analyze. but at the same time it was really interesting, and the fact that people were interested enough to participate helped keep me going.

(if you recognize something of yours on here and it makes you uncomfortable, please pm me and i will remove it. i just really love words and how people choose to use them, and if i were a dog i'd be rolling around happily in this pile of data)

 

I don't remember what I said about the green/red tomato but I'm pretty sure it was profoundly less interesting than the Vomit Red I came up with here

 

"red/green aka uncomfortable" was my favourite kumato (weird tomato) answer

 

I am sad because I cannot remember my answers

 

me too. like, i think "less saturated dark red" might've been me but i'm not entirely sure. that one kinda sounds like me and i do remember having an answer like that.
all i really remember about my answers is that i mostly used basic colour words, nothing especially fancy, i was tempted to say the eggplant was "eggplant" colour, and i think i might've described some things as either "lavender" or "lilac." other than that, i have no real idea.

 

I think I called the wierdmatoes 'muddy red' and I know I threw in question marks after at least like 3 or 4 colors, and I know I called at least one thing lavender.