endless

looking this up, that also refers to a specific pigment

whereas the lexical gap i'm looking for is a color word that refers to things as broad as "laso" does in toki pona, i.e an ambiguous word referring to most shades of both blue and green, which does not tell you without context anything more specific than "possibly blue or possibly green"

the thing i like about that word though is that it feels like it creates a new color by lumping together these two familiar colors, where you start to see the similarities where before you only saw them as divided

i think a way i might try to work around this lexical gap in poetry is to use the deliberately "wrong" color word for a description. describing leaves as "blue as the sky" or something (of course, lots of plants have actually blue, or rather "glaucus" (another great color word), leaves, so maybe this isn't the best example)

as a tangent, a couple years ago we came up with an experimental replacement color system for toki pona which co-lexes green, yellow, and red into a single color word "uka", and splits the blue part of laso out into its own color meaning just blue, "kelo", i.e color words that matched the visible light spectrum for someone with a deuteranopia

we don't have deuteranopia, and our goal with this experiment was to see if we could do to red and green what we did to blue and green- "feel" them as different shades of the same color. and i think we did to some extent

what was interesting though, is that we actually found it really hard to differentiate certain borderline uka's from kelo's, because they would look the same to me, but checking against a color blindness simulator, they would look like quite different colors, and very obviously identifiable as uka or kelo.

of course i don't really know how accurate color blindness simulators are. but it is a fun perceptual game to play, at any rate