Always funnier without the citation

The quality of the internet that I love the most is the aura of mystery surrounding what lies at the end of a link. Even though there may be some context clues available that can help define or categorize the general topic of a link, there is always that little bit of wonder lurking around the edges. It is this edginess that keeps us looking over our shoulders for nosy co-workers while we surf since we never know when links such as Mysteries of the Tax Code Revealed!!! are going to result in yet another link to really badly done porn.

The same is true for Wikipedia links. This factoid behemoth has cast more doubt on what I thought I knew than any other website besides the Microsoft Word Help pages. For instance, just this very morning, a mere few moments ago, I found at the site grow-a-brain a herd of links dealing with lists of items: a list of premature obituaries, a list of lost and found grocery lists (which has achieved what all lists hope to be some day: a book) and its accompanying newspaper article written in list format, and—the topic of my own post today—a list of fictional colors.

Before I get to why I called you here today, can we just for a moment revisit the fact that a newspaper in a major metropolitan area had nothing else to report other than a man collected lists found in grocery stores and then wrote a book about them?!? Is the war over? Has my universal health care card come in the mail and it's tucked under my latest Netflix dvd? The national food supply is safe? All the droughts have ended? Whew.

Back to my story about fictional colors. So there I was in graduate school, having successfully put off joining the real world for yet another year. This was my single semester attending graduate studies in anthropology. I look back on these 15 weeks fondly. I recall one class taught by a woman who made a career of studying blood in populations who don't mingle with the rest of us, aka: the Amish. One day, she was on a real roll and I was quite gripped. It was fascinating. One particular gem I remember is that it takes longer than you would think for inbreeding to result in a short bus candidate, although the actual number of generations has been lost to me. The other gem involves a lecture when, in the middle of her talk about characteristics of Amish blood that differs from non-Amish blood, she realized there was something missing from her lecture notes. As she moved to the door, a student who sounded remarkably like Johnny Olson said, "I happen to have an Amish gent right out here in the hallway. Let's bring him on in."

But, you ask, what does this have to do with colors and lists of colors? Well, nothing.

Another class I was taking that quarter was a basic course in everything you need to know about anthropology. And in this class, the professor talked about the art and science of anthropology, specifically he talked about dropping yourself into an unknown culture and trying to make understanding of what was happening around you. The demonstration accompanying this was great. He had a box of cups, mugs and glasses and he brought them out one at a time and asked us eager young graduate students to identify each. It was easy for the first few, we had no problem agreeing as a group that exhibit A was a "mug" and that exhibit B was a "glass." But things got pretty sketchy pretty quickly. Was exhibit C a mug or a glass and why? We needed a new term: cup, and things went downhill from there. The presence of a handle was not enough to define it as a mug. Nor was the material it was made from, the color, the size, or the dimensions. He made his point that so much of culture is based on shared agreements about definitions and even those raised in the culture may not be able to agree totally. And let's not even get into what happens when nobody but white men start defining terms for the rest of us.

But, you ask again, what does this have to do with colors? Well, think about the color red. The perfect red. The ideal red that you think of when someone says "think about the color red." Got it? Well, the shade and vibrancy that you have in your mind is very likely the same as the image in my head as well as the images that Francois in Paris, Kaleem in Riyadh, Santiago in Brasilia, and Foster in Canberra all thought of. RED seems to be universally agreed upon, regardless of culture—and it is the only color for which this is true.

When archaeologists and anthropologists studying ancient Greek texts found no mention of separate colors for water and grass, the question was asked: could the ancient Greeks not see the difference and therefore there is a physiological reason or was the difference visible to the ancient Greeks and they just didn't care to differentiate by using two words? Even though we might not agree that blue is the correct term for that hue, shouldn't there at least be a term for blue? Rather than the blue of the water and the green of the vegetation, the Greeks talked about the deep grue of the sea and the rich grue of the fields. (I don't think grue (or even eta-rho-upsilon-epsilon) is the actual term the ancient Greeks used.)

As the professor droned on (at this point the fascination of the mug/cup/glass demo had worn out), a note began circulating around the table. The effect the note had on each individual was striking. Each person who was respectfully listening, taking notes, or lightly snoring before seeing the note began to giggle before sending the note on. On the note was one word: bleen.

To this day, more than 10 years after the grue-bleen lecture, I still giggle when I think of grue or bleen. And THIS is the point of today's post. The fact that the words grue and bleen can make me laugh out loud!!—and then I go and learn something by clicking on the link.

Aside: I want a pair of Crayola crayons, one labeled grue-bleen and the other bleen-grue.

It turns out I have been practicing some scientific philosophy by throwing the words grue and bleen around willy-nilly. According to The Wik (can I call you The Wik?), X is grue if it was green when it was checked before some specific time. X is blue if it was not checked before said time. Seems like time is once again the variable here, kids. Let's not leave out bleen. X is bleen if it is blue and was checked before time t or green and was not checked. From The Wik:

The problem is as follows. A standard example of induction is this: All emeralds examined thus far are green. This leads us to conclude ... that also in the future emeralds will be green, and every next green emerald discovered strengthens this belief. [A smart person] observed that (assuming t has yet to pass) it is equally true that every emerald that has been observed is grue. Why, then, do we not conclude that emeralds first observed after t will also be grue, and why is the next grue emerald that comes along not considered further evidence in support of that conclusion? The problem is to explain why.

OK, I need to go to the local java hut in my outfit of the day which has no color coordination whatsoever and mixes both a soothing plaid pattern and a shocking yellow and ponder the grue-ness of my beverage. Just because all cups of joe have been brown up until today, will they still be brown tomorrow? And how do I know this???