Describing color is more properly a poetic art than a scientific one, argues Merriam Webster’s Kory Stamper in a recent, charming post that I cited in my latest dispatch for The One-Page Magazine. Looking back over more than 150 years’ worth of definitions, Stamper tracks the evolution (or, depending on your perspective, devolution) in approach from more picturesque comparisons — blue with “the clear sky,” red with “blood or rubies” — to the more formulaic color chart system used in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, which is currently undergoing revisions. “With its zeal for modernism and science and objectivity,” Stamper says, the most recent edition of the dictionary “sometimes lost sight of the forest for all the xylem and phloem.”

Color is personal, and judging from some heated debates over the years as to whether the Toyota hatchback my husband and I owned in 1997 was more green or more blue, can border on the ineffable, or at least the irresolvable. Cerise, to Stamper, “is the color of a suit set my grandmother owned and only wore to Christmas brunches at the Aviation Club, where she would sit me down in my velveteen layer-cake of a holiday dress and demand my silence while she and Mrs. Tannendorf would drink mimosas and bloody Marys and pine for the good old days of Eisenhower. That suit is, I am telling you, exactly cerise, but that doesn’t do you much good, does it?”

Just a few days after I read Stamper’s thoughts, a friend passed along a link to an excerpt from a fascinating BBC documentary that suggests the way we classify and define colors — the language we use — may actually determine how we see them.

The Himba tribe from northern Namibia, for instance, does not classify green and blue separately, the way Westerners do, but it does differentiate among various shades of what we call green. And when tested, members of the tribe, who are likely to have trouble with blue-green distinctions that most Westerners make easily, readily distinguish among greens that tend to look the same to Western eyes.

While the English language has 11 separate color categories — red, green, blue, yellow, black, white, grey, pink, orange, purple and brown — the Himba have only five. That may be because their environment does not include as many gradations. “Without the full range of saturated stimuli that can be artificially produced,” one team of scholars speculates, “traditional communities may have no need of the finer categorical distinctions” and thus have no reason to “refine their color lexicon further.” In other words, a Himba grandmother probably does not have a cerise suit set.

Assuming you’re not blue-green colorblind, you can test yourself using the chart below. How many shades of green do you see?

To find out the correct answer, see Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing’s breakdown of the RGB value for each square. He also has a screenshot from the BBC documentary that captures the green-blue test.