WW, i have gone all the way back to your original post, because of something i read to day.. in the todays book review, (If not, Winter, by Anne Carson, about the poet Sappho) the reviewer quotes Alcaeus, who called Sappho, "violet haired, pure, honey smiling" and quotes a translation of Sappho using Sappho's phrase "rosey-fingered moon"
Silver moon, waxy moon, golden harvst moon, but "rosey-fingered moon"? rosey is not a color i would associate with the moon. and violet haired?
i often wonder about colors, and if things looked different in times past. i have read, in ancient times, one could see venus in the day time (just as we can see the moon in the sky in the daytime)
Pollution has given everything a yellow orange haze, and made many things harder to see, and duller. Has it also changed how we see certain colors? was the sea really wine dark, and did it look different? will "blue" mean something different in the future? will increased pollution make the sky not blue, but give it a yellow cast, and make it look a pale green? and thousand of years from now, will people wonder how could we have called the sky blue?
or did ancients, used to seeing natural colors, (even today, the sky is not the same color from sun up to sun down, but changes constantly in color, not just from night to day, but during the night and day!)- did they see (and by this i mean associciate in there mind) colors differently? where grapes (which take weeks to change from small hard green marbles to soft, dark purple grapes,) seen differently than the colors of the sky (which changes almost hourly)?
I watch the sea grass in the bay, and every day it is a different color-- the first rains of spring, and the first hard frost yeild dramatic color changes, but every day the grass is different. i could say the grass is green.. and while the is "correct" it also inadequate.
