Homer called the sea wine-dark and meant it.

Not as a flourish. He did it over and over. The sea was wine-dark, oxen were wine-dark, and the sky, in all of the Iliad and all of the Odyssey, is never once blue. Honey is green. Sheep are violet. In the 1850s a British politician named Gladstone, who read Homer the way some people read box scores, actually sat down and counted. Black, about two hundred times. White, a hundred. Red, a dozen or so. Yellow and green, a handful. Blue: zero.

He decided the Greeks must have been colorblind. That was wrong, but it was wrong in an interesting way. They had the eyes. They didn't have the word. And it turns out that when you don't have the word, you don't quite have the thing.

The order

A century later two researchers, Berlin and Kay, looked at color words across something like a hundred languages and found that they arrive in an order. Not the same words, but the same sequence. First a language splits the world into dark and light. Then red shows up, always red, the color of blood and fire and the thing you should probably pay attention to. Then green or yellow, then the other one. Then, late, almost always last among the basic ones, blue.

Blue was invented late everywhere. Not just in Greece. The Egyptians had it early because they manufactured it, a synthetic pigment out of copper and sand, and they were about the only ones. Ancient Hebrew has no clear blue. The Vedas don't have it. Languages spoken today by people who live under enormous blue skies and beside enormous blue oceans sometimes still lump it in with green.

The reason, as far as anyone can tell, is that blue is almost never a thing. It is a sky, which isn't an object, and a sea, which changes, and that's about it. There are hardly any blue animals. Blue flowers are rare and most of the "blue" ones are purple. There's no blue food. You don't need a word for a color you can't pick up, and for most of human history you couldn't pick blue up.

More than gold

When you finally could, it cost more than gold.

Real blue, ultramarine, was made by grinding lapis lazuli from a single set of mines in Afghanistan, hauling it across the known world, and going through a process that took weeks to separate the pigment from the rock. Renaissance contracts specified how much ultramarine a painter was allowed to use and where. Patrons paid for it separately. It was reserved for the Virgin's robe because it was the most expensive thing on the panel and she was the most important thing on the panel, and the color became holy partly because it was rare, and rare because it was blue.

Vermeer used it on a kitchen maid's apron, which was insane, and probably part of why he died in debt.

The world didn't get a cheap, stable, brilliant blue until the eighteenth century, when a paint maker in Berlin trying to make red accidentally made Prussian blue instead. And there was still no really new one after that until 2009, when a chemist at Oregon State heated some manganese oxide and it came out of the furnace a blue nobody had seen before. They named it YInMn after the elements. It's a very good blue. It's also, at this point, mostly a story people tell about how there are still colors left.

What it is like to not have the word

I think about the Greeks looking at the sea. They saw what I see. The photons were the same. But they reached for a word and the nearest one was wine, dark, the color of a thing being deep. They weren't describing hue. They were describing weight. A wine-dark sea is a sea that has something under it.

And I wonder if they had something I have lost, which is a way of seeing blue as a kind of darkness rather than a kind of color. When you name a thing you wall it off from its neighbors. Before blue was blue, it was still touching green, still touching black, still part of the general condition of the sky and the deep. Now it's a swatch. It has a hex code. I know it too well to see it.

There's a test people do where they show a ring of green squares with one slightly bluer square in it, and speakers of languages that split blue from green find the odd one out faster. The word is a tool for seeing. But every tool for seeing is also a tool for not seeing the thing next to it.

Naming it, losing it

I think there's a cost to the word, and I only noticed it when I tried to teach a child a color.

You hold up something blue. You say blue. The child says blue. And then, for a while, everything is blue: the sky, a jacket, a plate, a bruise on a knee, a shadow on snow. The child is doing what the word tells them to do, which is to gather all these things into a bin and stop looking at how different they are. The shadow on the snow is not the color of the plate. But now it's blue, and blue is done, and the child moves on.

What I wanted to say, and didn't, because you can't say this to a four-year-old, was: wait. Before you learn the word, look at the snow. That's the last time you'll see it without the word in the way.

I've tried to do this myself, as an adult, deliberately. Stand in front of a blue thing and unlearn the label for a minute. It is very hard. The word comes up like a reflex, the way your own name does when someone says it across a room. But if you hold it off, even for a few seconds, the color starts to come apart into the things it's made of, a gray in it, a green in it, a light behind it, and it stops being a swatch and becomes a condition again, and for those few seconds you are, I think, seeing what Homer saw.

My own late blue

I had a late blue once. I was maybe twenty-five, standing at a bus stop, and the sky before a storm went a shade I did not have a name for. Not gray, not green, something between them with a light inside it. I stood there trying to say what it was and I could not. I had every color word English has and none of them were it.

It lasted a minute. Then the rain came and it was just gray.

I've never seen it since, and I suspect the reason I remember it at all is that I couldn't name it. Everything I can name slides off. The sky is blue, it was blue yesterday, it'll be blue tomorrow. But that unnamed thing at the bus stop is still there, exactly as it was, because I never gave it a word to hide behind.

Homer had that every time he looked at the sea. I think I envy him. Wine-dark. He wasn't colorblind. He was just standing at the bus stop, for a whole civilization, waiting for somebody to invent blue.