Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
How many colours are there? It's a question that seems to pass every child's lips at a certain age and is one that has no clear answer. The rainbow tells us the answer is seven, Richard of York gave battle in vain after all. But what of black and white? Many an annoying child would proudly proclaim that they are in fact not colours at all, in the same precocious tone as they would declare that thumbs aren't fingers. But they're clearly wrong in their prepubescent surety (on both counts). Black, white and their offspring grey are colours that objects can be, and therefore count among the illustrious family of colours. Of course they do rely much more on context, something green is still green whatever the light level is after all; but something white can be argued to become grey as the light dims, and something that appears black may be another colour just hidden from view.
Including the monochromatic trio raises our pantheon to nice a round ten, but we are not done yet. Firstly the rainbow itself may beget lies. Red, yellow, green & blue are as stolid colours as can be found, even if their borders may sometimes blur. But orange is weird, does it really qualify as a distinct colour? As many know, orange was not used in English parlance until the 1500s, before then that colour was just red-yellow (see the very-much-orange "robin redbreast"). And really it is only as distinct from those two as those infuriatingly ambiguous hues are between green and blue. And "orange" as a word just refers to the fruit, and we don't count other reference-based colour references as true, distinct colours (think "sky-blue" or "olive-green"). But as I will look further into later, even as a newcomer orange has surely now flourished into its own thing in the eyes of Westerners, and thus shall remain on the list.
The little twins of indigo and violet at the end of the rainbow however, have very blurred personalities, and seem to hail from a different era. Today both would most likely just be classified as "purple". The confusion here comes not, like orange, from the newness of the terminology: rather from the newness of its popularity. Before the industrial revolution, hues around the purple end of the spectrum were very rare, and so you could get away with just referring to the colours by their source. "Indigo" is a dye extracted from the indigo-plant (a type of pea), and "violet" is a little flower found in bushes and hedgerows; so again these are purely referential colours akin to orange. "Purple", however, comes from a specific dye made from crushing a species of beetle seasnail, a method of production kept secret and expensive by the City of Tyre for centuries and used as the dye of preference for Kings and Emperors in Asia, Europe and Africa. But with the advent of "the colour revolution" and synthetic dyes, purple became more common and we settled on this regal tone to refer to all purple-ish hues, thus engulfing indigo and violet into the maw of purple. Leaving us with nine colours in our list.
Now come the tricky two: eponymous to this article. Both are evidently colours, they are used as such and cannot (at least in their pure form) be mistaken for another colour. But first let's tackle pink. There's a widespread and thoroughly annoying falsity that is oft spread about pink, usually from the mouth of that precocious child from the beginning of this article who has grown up in body but not mind. And that is that pink is "just light red". Its not. A "light red" might be classed as closer to pink than red, but a pure pink has a different hue altogether. The reason behind this is rather complex though. When you look at a rainbow you see the spectrum of visible wavelengths of light spreading from red to violet (purple). But anyone who has ever booted up paint.exe knows that the colour picker loops, you go from red through the usual rainbow gang into purple and then through the "weird zone" back to red. That weird zone is known as the realm of magenta, and is what happens when red light is mixed with purple-blue light, a combination so rare in fact that no one had ever seen magenta until as recently as 1859 when it was first synthesised and promptly named after a military victory of Napoleon III's for some reason. But really nobody calls that hue "magenta". It, and the hues redward of it, are all commonly known as "pink": as different from red as orange is.
Brown, on the other hand, really is dark orange (sort of). To get "brown" onto your computer screen you do in fact need a hue between red and yellow with a decreased brightness. This is a fascinating phenomenon to me, because we called brown brown far before we called orange orange. So really orange is light-brown rather than vice versa. Of course there has always been much more of a need for a name for brown than orange due to its massive prevalence in nature, but even though it sits in such a restricted part of the colour wheel, there is no mistaking a brown when you see one. This boils down to a psychophenomenal difference, rather being distinct noumenally. We see brown because we named brown. The very act of naming became an act of creation.
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. -Gen 2:19We see that while creation is still as it has been created, mankind has profoundly altered his own perception of that world by dividing it into distinct named concepts. But we also see that God wished for us to undertake this task as his direct stewards on Earth, and therefore the lines we draw in the sand between different animals (or colours) become the true lines of separation. The distinction between what is and what is perceived becomes meaningless for it is how we have deemed it to be under God's providence. This really is amazing to think about, as it means that we can alter the very structure of the Universe through our words without actually changing anything external to our own minds. Brown is brown because we said it was brown. And know we can't see brown as anything but brown, even if we logically know it to be a dark orange. The phenomena has become the noumena. But pink is just pink.
