My husband and I went to an exhibition about the solar system at our local natural history museum. There was also an exhibition for children about the human body with really good explanations how genes work, how our ear works, stuff like that.
We came to the part about the eyes and there was an explanation of colorblindness and the different forms together with the tests. You know - the circles with dots where you have to read the number. Anyway, I forgot why but he started reading out the numbers. And well, he got one of them wrong. Not the test for full-on red-green blindness, but he can’t tell certain shades apart.
In hindsight I had noticed that he sometimes confuses names for colors apart from the basic ones or that he doesn’t like it when I identify an object by its color (e.g. “give me the pink one”). But I’d always chalked it up to German not being his mother language.
Most people agree with her. But for me calling such a warm tone “grey” is weird, it’s like calling your typical red apple “pink” instead of “red”, you know? To complicate it further I typically refer to fur colour with the same words I’d use for human hair colour, and I’m not sure they don’t map 1:1 with colours used for objects.
(Another situation this pops up is when talking about magenta. But it’s more like a discussion about the “main” colour vs. hue.)
It is! And colour words are weird too. And they somewhat influence your perception, too.