The linguistics of “color”

Abstract

Introduction Returning home from a recent field trip in Mexico, some ten pieces of my luggage were lost by the airline. I was directed to a service desk where I was asked to describe my luggage to the clerk. I was given a large plastic sheet with an array of some eighty to ninety different bags pictured, grouped as to type and each marked with a code number. Apparently the folk vocabulary of most passengers is not adequate to the task of describing luggage accurately, and this chart with its numbered items had been invented to circumvent the indeterminacy of ordinary language and facilitate precise characterizations. The clerk prompted my entry into this memory-based matching task by asking me whether the bags were latched or zippered, large or small, etc. Not all the selections were obvious: sometimes I wanted to change the code number when I encountered a better match for one of my bags or understood better what alternatives the various groups represented; and some matches were never very satisfactory: for example, my son's French horn had to be matched with the number for a flute case. After I selected a number for each item, I had to describe the color of the bag.

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