Ooglian Yellow: Fun color-naming

Duron paint colors and names
—I don't work for them

As a kid, I had a fascination with the names of colors, like those on crayon labels or on paint color samples at the hardware store. I liked how a nice name could give the color some exigence or something, and being the one to decide on a color name just looked like so much fun. For a while I looked through clothing catalogs and wrote in my own names for the color choices and named the colors of manmade things around me when I was bored. 

I recall an illustration of a page from an alien catalog in one of Bruce Coville's I Was a Sixth Grade Alien books in which some product came in "Ooglian Yellow or Vink Blue"—interesting enough to me that I remembered after about half my lifetime. The names of colors, and somewhat in turn, the perception of colors, are tied to culture, which makes it important for fiction writers to make deliberate choices with their color naming when writing about other societies. Well, the Sixth Grade Alien books never explain what 'ooglian' and 'vink' are, but those color names do humorously show that the aliens are pretty alien.

Here's an attempt to reinstate in myself that childlike pastime by renaming some Glidden paint colors—not trying to advertise them either—in the yellow range, possibly including Ooglian. It's still fun. When I was younger, my name choices were definitely more spontaneous and based on looser associations. I remember sometimes I would just make up a nonsense word out of sounds that reminded me a little of the color, my sort of childlike way of imitating color names that were named after unfamiliar proper nouns.

Today I had to consciously allow myself to make looser, maybe more hypnopompia-like associations than I otherwise would, since looking at most of these colors, especially juxtaposed like this, just made me think of the colors of the off-white walls of a house during different times of day—"Evening in DST" was the first one I named, since it reminded me quite clearly of the way the walls look on a sunny evening during dinner on the first day of daylight saving time. I wonder if I'd be able to name greenish paint colors without resorting to a lot of plant names. I rather admire those Duron blue names up there—look how many interesting and pretty names they use that don't just refer to the obvious sky and sea. Naming colors seems a pretty good exercise in creativity for that reason, the need to balance sensibility and elegance on one side, and variety and spontaneity on the other.