Why Isn't the Sky Blue?

[Dave Monroe]

What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're
Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color
is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep
are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard
introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William
Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge
Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color
reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something
startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library,
where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps
reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in
stages. And blue always comes last. Jules Davidoff, professor of
neuropsychology at the University of London, helps us make sense of
the way different people see different colors in the same place. Then
Guy Deutscher tells us how he experimented on his daughter Alma when
she was just starting to learn the colors of the world around, and
above, her.

http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt-blue/

Blue:
The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7116.html

The Color Blue in Vineland

http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blue_in_Vineland

Reading: Pynchon's Prayer

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=7460

Cf. ...

"'Some Lapis ...?'" (M&D, Ch. 71, p. 689)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69698