Colours

Randall Munroe, who draws xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” did a survey of people's use of colour names.

First, a few basic discoveries:

• If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
• “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
• A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
• Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

What's that about SQL? It seems that a lot of his readers remembered the comic “Exploits of a Mom.”

Lots more under the link. His discussion of his methodology is pretty interesting.