In this week's bonus, we talk with Kory Stamper about why color science is surprisingly dangerous. We look at the literal chemical explosions at DuPont dye labs and the bitter rivalry between Webster’s Third and the American Heritage Dictionary. Then, we look at Kory's top three book recommendations for fellow color nerds.
In this week's bonus, we talk with Kory Stamper about why color science is surprisingly dangerous. We look at the literal chemical explosions at DuPont dye labs and the bitter rivalry between Webster’s Third and the American Heritage Dictionary. Then, we look at Kory's top three book recommendations for fellow color nerds.
Find Kory Stamper at KoryStamper.com or on Bluesky.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings Grammarpaloozians! Thank you so much for being here and supporting the show. And we are here today for your bonus segment with Kory Stamper, author of "True Color," lexicographer, formerly for Merriam-Webster for many, many years, just knows everything about words and now everything about color, I swear you must be one of the color experts in the world. Kory, thank you for being here.
Kory Stamper: Thank you so much for having me. I think there are color experts who would argue with you on that, but I'll take it.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, at least in our world, in the world—word nerd world.
Kory Stamper: That works. I'll take that crown. Yep.
Mignon Fogarty: So, at the end of the episode—the main episode, which if you haven't heard it yet, you should go listen. We were starting to talk about the people involved in making the color entries for "Webster's Third" and even starting back to "Webster's Second." It really, in a way it seems like it chewed up and spit people out.
Kory Stamper: It really did, yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: And the personalities really influenced how the color definitions came up. Do you want to give us sort of a broad overview of the people and the times?
Kory Stamper: Yeah, absolutely. So, for "Webster's Third," there was one primary consultant for color. His name was I.H. Godlove. He was a really well-known physical chemist and color scientist. He, in fact, had sort of a couple of really important papers on illuminance, so that has to do with what light is best to view which color and where. And he was just kind of—he had his fingers in every pie he could. He was a member of this group called the Inter-Society Color Council; in fact he was one of the founding members. And this was a group that was pulled together and had people from all over who were interested in color and who worked on color. So, people from industry, manufacturers, people from the science end, and that's everyone from chemists and physicists to people who worked for the government in color measurement, artists, people who did color forecasting, people who did all sorts of anything that had to do with color description or color making.
Mignon Fogarty: So, he founded that and ran it—does that exist today still?
Kory Stamper: It still does. You can join the ISCC, in fact. And if you are a member, then you too will get to hear, you know, all sorts of papers about colors and illuminance and and you know, all Webster's Third sorts of weird things about TVs. TVs are very fascinating for color folks. Who knew? Yeah!
Mignon Fogarty: So, he wrote these long, long letters to the Merriam-Webster people, like badgering them it sounds like.
Kory Stamper: Oh, yeah! And when I say they were long letters and he was a prolific writer, that was just who he was. He was involved in a number of academic societies, he was a top scientist for General Aniline, he worked at DuPont for a while. And he really just—he was just an effusive person, everything he did he just kind of gave 110% to. He was also a really generous collaborator; he was really well-known for that. And I think that plays a huge part in "Webster's Third" in particular. So, when the ISCC first formed, one of their first problems, they dealt with color problems, and problem number two was coming up with a plain language system to describe color. And I.H. really took the helm of that. He had done a little bit of defining at the very end of "Webster's Second" in 1931. He was kind of brought in mostly to clean things up. There had been a previous color scientist who had, much like I.H., just kind of, you know, sent in a lot of long letters and said, "this is all very complicated," but didn't actually define much. And I.H. picked up again for “The Third."
As I said in the first episode, he died suddenly in the middle of defining. And that's where we get our second major and hidden color definer, and that is his wife, Margaret Godlove. Margaret was a scientist in her own right; she had a bachelor's in chemistry. She worked at DuPont as a file clerk. That was kind of the option for women who were interested in the sciences but did not have a PhD in the '20s and '30s when she was working. So, she became a patent clerk, she was a file clerk, she was the head patent clerk for a while at DuPont. And that's where she met I.H.
DuPont was one of the main experimental color labs in America at that point. It employed tens of thousands of people in—at the Deepwater Horizon facility, which is—the Deepwater facility was where all the dye works were, it was where all sorts of experimental material science was happening. So, Kevlar and neoprene came out of the Deepwater facility.
Mignon Fogarty: Am I remembering right that there were explosions related to color experiments there?
Kory Stamper: Oh, yeah! I mean, that's the thing. Even still, manufacturing color at scale is not a safe thing. You know, we think of like, “Oh, you just mix a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it turns purple,” and that is not what happens!
Mignon Fogarty: I was really surprised.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, it's, you know, a lot of the chemicals that are used to make a lot of the dyes, commercial dyes that we use, even today, they're really dangerous chemicals. In fact, there are—there's lots of overlap between pharmaceuticals, explosives, and dyes. There was one dye that was manufactured early on in the 20th century, it gave this beautiful yellow, we know it as TNT. It's not a dyestuff, it's an explosive, and that's kind of how a lot of these chemical companies that had dye works, it was really common for there to be massive, you know, chemical accidents, explosions. It was not a safe industry to be a part of. And so, Margaret married I.H., and as was required by company policy and law, she quit.
Mignon Fogarty: Outrageous.
Kory Stamper: You couldn't be married and—because you know, you're supposed to, if you're a woman and you get married, you're going to go have babies, that's what you're supposed to do. But obviously they were both older when they married, and I.H. really respected Margaret so much. And she assisted him quite a bit with the color defining for Merriam-Webster. I.H. was hospitalized several times while the color defining was happening, and it was really clear to me as I was going through all of this archival stuff, you know, I'd get a letter from I.H., it was dated in July and he said, “I've been in the hospital for a month,” and it would be accompanied with a pack of hundreds of definitions that were all dated while he was hospitalized and he had said, you know, “I wasn't able to work but I'm about to get back to work.” So what was happening? It became clear that I.H. probably came up with the defining structure, but Margaret is the one who did all of the actual defining. She's the one who picked those supplemental colors for distinctions, she's the one that wrote everything, she's the one that kept track of the style guide, which was wild and changing every moment.
Mignon Fogarty: I love the clue that you found about the, very detailed, the periods in her definitions.
Kory Stamper: Yeah. So, one of the first things that they decided at Merriam-Webster was that definitions would not end in terminal punctuation, no periods. And this was, this was a departure from “The Second.” “The Second” used periods at the end of many of their definitions. And this was a thing that when I.H. would send in his letters and he would send in sample definitions that he clearly had written, it was just all over the place. He always ended everything with a period. But all of the slips that got sent in were not, they didn't end with a period. And in fact, as the slips went further along in time, you could see that there was an integration of small style changes that really only lexicographers would've caught on to. This was a thing with a lot of the special editors; they were fabulous genius people who just did not have lexicography sense at all. So, they'd send to these long disquisitions, and then some in-house editor would have to hammer that into a dictionary definition-shaped object. But Margaret had a really keen eye, just a really good sense of what a dictionary entry needed.
And she did refuse to define a handful of terms. She said they were beyond her skill and those were the basic color terms, so that's like blue and green and red. And what she did was she actually referred those to another friend of I.H.’s, Dorothy Nickerson. Dorothy Nickerson was a scientist who worked at the USDA. She was also well known in the color field. And she decided she would go ahead and do these core color definitions, which are so difficult to do because, really for scientists, it's all about the, you know, what's the nanometer of that particular wavelength? And, and that means nothing to normal folks, but Dorothy did it. She did a really beautiful job of sort of balancing what we would call "comparative defining."
She did a little bit of defining for “The Third,” and she's actually the one who came up with those color plates because she was very interested in color education, just like I.H. was. And she wanted very badly to make sure that this sort of structure, this standard that they had used to define for “The Third” and which they were trying to push into science and industry. On the color side, it's called the ISCCNBS standard. She really wanted that to get out and so she used the color plates in “The Third” as sort of a primer for the ISCCNBS.
Mignon Fogarty: So Dorothy was a strong adherent to the scientific ideas of color as much as I.H. was. She for good, clear definitions that people could understand. But one of the backlashes to “Webster's Third” was how science-y it was, right?
Kory Stamper: It, really was, there was this push from the humanities in the early sixties against what was perceived as broad scientism — sort of science will save us in American culture. And for whatever reason, a couple of really important thinkers and writers latched on “Webster's Third” as an example of what scientism was doing to language, and wrote scathing reviews, scathing articles, and really pushed back against a lot of this highly, highly technical, you know, structured, defining style. And that, you know, one of those people, he had a little, uh, a newsletter called the Lexiconoclast, and he highlighted the definition for color, which was actually not really a definition, it was just a very long essay about color sensations, and color perception, and color measurement, but he latched on that. It's like, this is so technical, no one's going to understand it. And this is, you know, this isn't about communication. This is about showing off. And that was a lot of what the backlash was about was science is taking over. We need to let humans be human. We need to not give the sciences too much sway in our language.
Mignon Fogarty: And then this led to the founding of the “American Heritage Dictionary,” which is where Dorothy ended up.
Kory Stamper: That's right. So, the “American Heritage Dictionary” was a backlash to “The Third,” and it was funded by James Parton. He ran the “American Heritage Magazine.” He had a lot of money and no experience in running a dictionary. So, the staff scrambled and they hired actually a ton of people who had worked on “Webster's Third,” who burned out really quickly and so left and did other things. And they hunted down a lot of the consultants that wrote for "Webster's Third,” including Dorothy Nickerson. And they had said to her, you know, “Hey, we want you to do for us what you did for ‘Websters.’” And she was frustrated with Merriam Webster. She had felt like they had not treated her well. They had not given her, they had promised her quite a number of the color plates that she put together. And in the end, they didn't give her nearly as many as she thought they owed her. So when “American Heritage” said, “Hey, you wanna right the wrongs of ‘Merriam Webster’?” She was like, “Absolutely!”
So, Dorothy Nickerson did all of the defining for the “American Heritage Dictionary.” On the same principles that I.H. used and Margaret used for “The Third.” And it's really fascinating. If you're a dictionary nerd, I encourage you to get a copy of “American Heritage's First Edition” and “The Third” and compare the color definitions. Because they're using the same measurements, they're using the same basic vocabulary and sometimes they are so wildly different from each other that you're kind of going “Whose ‘eggplant’ is actually the right ‘eggplant’ here according to these two standards?”
Mignon Fogarty: Which ones do you think are better?
Kory Stamper: I actually think Margaret's is better. Dorothy's is more precise for the “American Heritage Dictionary,” because it talks about like…”eggplant” can be a range of dark purples, and Dorothy lists all the major types of dark purples. So, it's like, “Oh, it's a dark bluish purple to a dark, reddish purple, to a dull bluish purple, to a blackish purple.”
And Margaret's is much more concise and gets it across to a lay person. I think Margaret's is a variable color, averaging a blackish purple, which is better, like you don't get lost in so many purples. There’s fewer purples. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: “American Heritage,” the dictionary built on spite.
Kory Stamper: Yeah. It's true. It's true.
Mignon Fogarty: And Dorothy, I'm not saying at all that she was a spiteful person, but there was this tiny detail that she held a grudge because they didn't include this word she thought was really important.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, it's very true. So one of the things that happened during the writing of the “American Heritage Dictionary,” the “American Heritage Dictionary” was intended to be an unabridged dictionary. And they ran out of money. So then in the middle they're like, “Well, we're gonna turn it into an abridged dictionary. It's gonna be a family dictionary, maybe not as sciencey as we thought.” And so they cut a bunch of the color imagery terms. So color imagery is about the measurement of color and the standardization of color.
They kept most of the color names, but one of the words they cut was the word “metamer.” And if you are a color scientist, “metamer” is a very important word. A metamer is a color that appears to be one color in one setting, usually a light setting and another color in another setting. And it's, it would kind of be like for word nerds saying, “Uh, we're just gonna pull preposition from the dictionary. No one cares about those. Like, eh, I mean, they're small and who cares? It's just kind of a nerd thing.” So, Dorothy kept all of her defining slips. So I found all of those in a corporate archive, and she kept a copy of both “Webster's Third” and the “American Heritage Dictionary.” And she noted in pen, in her “American Heritage Dictionary” where metamer should have gone and what the definition should have been.
And, in letters to people when they said, “Oh, I saw the ‘American Heritage,’ and you're, and you did excellent work.” And she'd say, “Thank you so much. I am so sad that ‘metamer’ is not in there. Please don't think worse of me, because ‘metamer’ is not in the ‘American Heritage Dictionary.’”
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. Just like a word person would say, “I'm so sorry the prepositions aren't in there. I told them they should be,” even you would carry it with you your whole life.
Kory Stamper: I know. Yeah, exactly.
Kory Stamper: Exactly. Yeah, I know. And it just goes to show how complex the production of dictionaries actually is. You know, we think of them as being this sort of almost theoretically perfect, platonic ideal of capturing language. But you know, they're affected by market forces and if you run out of money or you run out of staff, you run out of money and you run out of staff, you have to change.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no. It seemed like the color definitions throughout the years have just been affected by catastrophe after catastrophe, or struggle after struggle. And you can see why they are the way they are now.
Kory Stamper: Yeah, for sure.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. Well, the book is “True Color.” You wanna get the book and after you are done, after you're done reading “True Color,” then Kory has some recommendations for other books that you might wanna read.
Kory Stamper: I do. I focus specifically on other color books you might wanna read. So if you are interested in the history of individual colors, individual color names in particular, I recommend "The Secret Lives of Color” by Cassius St. Clair. which my copy has this beautiful, well, it has a lot of my sticky notes in it, but it also has this beautiful forage rainbow.
Mignon Fogarty: I have read that book, I got the ebook and I've always regretted it actually.
Kory Stamper: There is something about when you're doing, I mean, I bought a lot of books for the color, color book and, there's something about having the book in hand.
If you're interested in the history of the science of color, and particularly of how people came up with the idea of smashing rocks and putting them in oil and painting with them, I recommend “Bright Earth” by Philip Ball, “Bright Earth: The Invention of Color.” It's a really fascinating, very accessible scientific history of pigments in color.
Mignon Fogarty: Neat.
Kory Stamper: And if you are interested, if you're the person who goes on the internet and sees those things that are like, “This square is blue, unless you cover it with your hand, and then it's brown,” then you absolutely need to read Joseph Alber's “Interactions of Color,” this is the foundational text where most of those things come from, and it's also very pretty on the inside. So you get to see all sorts of things about how we perceive color, how colors affect the way we see them when they're next to each other. So Joseph Alber's “Interaction of Color,” Philip Ball’s, “Bright Earth,” and Cassius St. Claire's, “The Secret Lives of Colors.” Go forth.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Mignon Fogarty: Those all sound great. Thank you, Corey.
Kory Stamper: Yeah. Thanks for having me
Mignon Fogarty: So once again the book one last time is “True Color, the Strange and Spectacular Quest…”
Kory Stamper: “To define color.”
Mignon Fogarty: “From Azure to Zinc Pink.” It's a long subtitle.
Kory Stamper: It is a long one. Sorry, y'all.
Mignon Fogarty: It would make a great gift for someone who is into words and color in particular, and the history of dictionaries.You know, we didn't even touch on it, but I learned so much about Gove, who is the editor of “Webster’s Third” and how influential and, interesting he was. So if you're interested in dictionaries, this really is also a fabulous book.
Mignon Fogarty: If people want to catch up with you, keep up with your writings, should they find you?
Kory Stamper: I have a blog, as does everybody. It's at Korystamper.com and I occasionally post on bluesky. That's Korystamper.bluesky.social.
Mignon Fogarty: Awesome. Thanks Kory.
Kory Stamper: Yep. Thanks so much.