“What Aristotle and his Renaissance successors imagined was a range of colors, varying according to greater and lesser degrees of white combined with black:

black | gray | blue | leek-green | violet | red | yellow | white

. . . [S]omething like the same perception is still registered by speakers of many of the world’s languages, who distinguish color primarily in terms of ‘dark’ versus ‘bright.’ ”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.