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aestel October 27 2008, 23:40:53 UTC
It does seem that blue/green is a major area of fuzziness in language and perception.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language

But also, Gardner points out that in Chaucer's Middle English, there was no word for the color orange, but that we can't assume Chaucer didn't perceive that color since he did refer twice to a shade "betwixe yelow and reed."

Barfield and his followers like Arthur Zajonc are taking off from Goethe's theory of color rather than Newton's--a theory that gives active human consciousness a big role in what we see. Gardner defends a more mechanistic model with the eye as a camera reporting the same set of light waves for all humans.

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