Tuesday, October 14, 2008

"Macaroni and Cheese"

J dug around and finally unearthed our art box--the rubbermaid container that has our assorted art supplies, including my 64-crayon box of Crayola crayons. So we introduced R to coloring.The finished product, hanging proudly on our refrigerator!

As an aside: While R colored with J, I amused myself by reading all the different colors on the crayons. (R is looking at "Macaroni and Cheese" in the picture below.)
What I'm going to say really isn't news, since I bought these crayons like 10 years ago or something, but it's been a long time since I paid attention to the names of the colors. A lot of them are different from the ones I remember from grade school. There seem to be a lot more colors named after things, (i.e., they're not actual names of colors) such as "Dandelion" and the aforementioned "Macaroni and Cheese." And there were a slew of names that, I guess, were just meant to be clever, like "Purple Mountain's Majesty" or "Mauvelous" or "Tickle Me Pink."

Honestly, if it were up to me, I would just as soon call the colors an actual color. Light Purple, Mauve, and Pink all seem to me to be perfectly fine names for crayons. Do I sound like a fuddy-duddy here? I feel like my age is talking or something! But I just don't see what you gain by calling a crayon "Purple Mountain's Majesty."

1 comment:

  1. I agree!!! Kids learn color names by crayon usage, at least for the more specific shade names like aqua, violet, burnt umber, etc. I remember being 4 years old and reading "sea foam green" and remembering that for years.

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