Dear Crabby,
My husband and I are trying to pick out new paint for our kitchen and bath and we are constantly fighting about it. Is there an easy solution to picking out colors around the house that you know of?
Sincerely, Martha Sickofit
Dear Mrs. Sickofit,
The whole color war issue started back with the fall of man, I believe. My interpretation is that women got tired of arguing with men about colors so they made up some secret vocabulary to discuss these matters among themselves. Men only know the basic colors that were covered in elementary school. “Roy G Biv,” I believe, was the acronym for these seven known colors. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet are the only colors that are real in my mind. But of course trying to paint some room in our house has the missus pulling out the secret vocabulary with words like pumpkin, asparagus, or even latte! Sometimes it sounds
more like she is going to the Farmer’s Market instead of the paint store! She tells me these are the popular colors and that I am just being difficult. Then I get upset and tell her she is just making these words up, and she storms off to get backup from a girlfriend of hers. The last time we painted the kitchen, the conversation went from bad to worse real fast. I said, “Let’s just paint the kitchen green or yellow this time.” She then responded, “I was thinking of chartreuse!” To which I replied, “That’s not a color; that’s a triangle!” She countered, “No you’re thinking of obtuse.” So I retorted, “No, that’s when you’re overweight.” Groaning, she said, “That’s called obese.” I said, “No, no, that was the kid on the Andy Griffith show!” To which she replied with great exasperation, “That was Opie played by Ron Howard!” By then, I was so confused and frustrated that I told her that she and Forrest Gump could go figure out what color the kitchen was going to be then! Switching gears, she laughingly said, “That would be Tom Hanks then, not Ron Howard, but I bet both of them know what color chartreuse is anyway!” I guess she must have cooled down and seen things my way after all, because the kitchen ended up being some halfway color between green and yellow. So I guess you just have to be persistent and try to stick to the basic vocabulary if you are speaking to one of us males. None of this fancy shmancy fruit and vegetable secret color talk – try to remember “Roy G Biv!” Good luck, and call me if you want my advice on your kitchen someday!
Sincerely, Dear Crabby
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