Pantone knows color. Pantone’s business is color. So who better to name the color of the year than Pantone? And yet they got it wrong.
Something insidious is going down at the Pantone Color Institute. Each December, the company announces a new Color of the Year—and its 2019 selection, a warm pink tone called Living Coral, feels like a troll directed at a planet rapidly growing inhospitable to the many organisms that call it home.
What? Yes, the “warm pink tone” of Living Coral is . . . horrifying.
In this context, the word living drips with (pink) shade. Pantone might as well have named it “The Rare Coral That Has Not Yet Been Bleached, as It Inevitably Someday Will in This Increasingly Toxic Toilet Bowl We Call Earth.” Blithely describing the color as a source of “emotional nourishment” and akin to “a big hug,” Pantone Vice President Laurie Pressman told the Associated Press that, yes, Living Coral is indeed a shoutout to the reefs around the world that are dying off in warming seas. In the Great Barrier Reef alone, one 2016 bleaching event killed almost 30 percent of shallow-water corals. Does that make you sad? Wrap yourself in the big, comforting hug of the color those graying coral skeletons used to be!
To the extent this is comprehensible, the problem is that Pantone’s 2019 Color of the Year is expressed in the rhetoric of hopefulness when every woke person knows that humans are destroying the environment, including coral reefs, and they are dying in this “Toxic Toilet Bowl We Call Earth.”
Perhaps some of you truly care what color is chosen as the color of the year. More likely, some just can’t bear the idea of something being chosen that isn’t worthy of outrage, color inclusive. Maybe there needs to be a color called “miserable.”
Is there nothing that can survive the intense scrutiny of the perpetually outraged? I don’t care for pinks very much, which is no doubt the product of my toxic masculinity, but if that’s the color they want to pick, whatever. And if they want to name it Living Coral even though the coral is dying, DYING!!!, I will still sleep well tonight.
It’s wonderful to be deeply and passionate concerned about the welfare of the Great Barrier Reef, or its cousins, but this is just about a color. And the year after, another color will be selected. We can only hope it’s given a name so coddling to the offended that they, like me, can sleep well at night too.
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I had thought that “what’s your favorite colo(u)r?” was one of those questions that didn’t have a wrong answer…
It’s not the color that’s wrong, but the name of the color. Maybe if they called it “labia majora irritation” instead?
I’m stealing that one. I don’t know how, where, or when i’ll use it, but I will definitely use it.
I’m confused (which is nothing new). Is Pantone naming the color, or choosing amount previously-named colors?
Also, why is an Italian cake picking a color of the year? And why is Slate writing about this? Does it make sense? No, ladies and gentlemen of this so-called blog, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit!
“So-called blog.”
I think we now know one of the answers to not give for the Questions Three…
SHG at SJ World Headquarters
And yet I picture myself in a suit.
Increasingly toxic toilet bowl? Have we forgotten that the Cuyahoga River used to catch fire? The river. Caught. Fire. On several occasions. A century before that, “walking down the street” of a major city was a euphemism for “wading through ankle-deep horse feces”.
You know why gentlemen always walked on the street side when walking with a lady?
Further, why do the English go to the left and Americans to the right? (No put down for other cultures that follow either methodology, but one might seriously think about how those entities allowed their cultures to evolve).
There is something in the drinking of tea, and the reading of tea leaves that answers that question. Pantone must be drinking a lot of tea, and not getting enough sleep. Do Italians drink tea?
(Mumble, mumble, something about woke in there, mumble.)
Keeping to left or right when driving is arbitrary. As long as everyone on the same road stays to the same side, crashes are generally avoided.
Gentlemen walking on the outside, on the other hand, is not arbitrary.
Doesn’t being a gentleman inflame certain portions of the SJW crew? Could it be considered a form of sexual assault, or at least denigration?
I never thought opening the door for others would be considered abhorent. Do it for men, OK, do it for women, Chauvinism. Whether chauvenistic or not, I rarely see certain sexes doing it for others, and even more rarly apprecieated, from either sex. If it happend in California by a Harvard student on summer vacation, what would Harvard do?
There’s a pinacle of appropriateness that stiving for might cause endemic hernias.
There are many things a gentleman would do that might inflame an SJW. But we do it because we are gentlemen, not because we expect appreciation in return.
That’s why I do it. The expectation of appreciateion isn’t expected, just missed. This is not a new revelation, I have felt it for a couple of decades.
The new problem comes from the consternation of whether continuing to be a gentleman is appropriate in todays world, or more specifically, in the US. I suspect that my ingrained training will cause me to continue to be ‘the gentleman’. How to react when it is forcefully unappraciated is the new conundrum. I suspect I would respond with ‘sorry for being polite’. Going further might depend upon circumstances (can you not also be polite?).
I find that in at least some other countries, politeness (being a gentleman) is still appreciated.
who would be foolish enough to trust a man who is being chivalrous?
https://youtu.be/qOFjydxI2Uk
Somebody had to remind city dwellers there are worse things than horse manure.
So pathetic and try-hard, I’m amazed it isn’t called i-coral.