Page:Color standards and color nomenclature (Ridgway, 1912).djvu/31

 lustreless, appearing on a dull, sometimes velvety surface, while again it may be more or less glossy, even to the degree of appearing as if varnished. To deal with these variations, however, requires simply the use of suitable adjectives. For example: To indicate a color which has no lustre or brightness, the adjective matt (or mat) may be used, in preference to dull, which implies reduction in purity or chroma; other adjectives, appropriate in special cases, being velvety, glossy, burnished metallic, matt-metallic, etc.

—No other person has presented so forcibly the urgent need for reform in popular nomenclature nor stated so clearly and concisely its shortcomings and the simple remedy, as Mr. Milton Bradley, from one of whose educational pamphlets on the subject the following is quoted : "The list of words now employed to express qualities or degrees of color is very small, in fact a half dozen comprise the more common terms, and these are pressed into service on all occasions, and in such varied relations that they not only fail to express anything definite but constantly contradict themselves . . . Tint, Hue and Shade are employed so loosely by the public generally, even by those people who claim to use English correctly, that neither word has a very definite meaning, although each is capable of being as accurately used as any other word in our every day vocabulary"

Certainly one would expect that men of learning, at least, would employ the broader color terms correctly; but some of the highest autorities on color-physics habitually use them interchangeably, as if they were quite synonymous; and even the dictionaries, with few exceptions, give incorrect or "hazy" definitions of these