Krazy Kolors!

My Mom sent me a birthday gift, and for the sake of this story, my birthday was, let’s call it, oh, last week. It was a nice pullover fleece, from some hippy company my Mom had found. It was a nice piece of clothing, good cut, maybe a little small, but of course Mom had chosen a shade of blue so gay that Siegfried and Roy would have looked at it and said, “Eh, it’s a little gay.” But that’s not the point.

The point is that, along with the lovely metrosexual garment my mother had chosen, there was included a catalog from the company. Again, nice enough clothes, but the company was one of these places where they can’t just call a red shirt red. It’s gotta be brick, or rust, or blush, or some other goddamn thing. There was one shirt that wasn’t light brown, it was ‘dirt’. Dirt! That is not a descriptive that makes me want to buy a $28 dollar shirt. If I wanted a shirt that would be ‘dirt-colored’, I’d buy a white shirt, and bury it in the back yard for a while. I can understand wanting to appear different, and wanting to captivate the imagination with cool new color names, but you also have to use your freaking heads. The idea here is to come up with new color names that are BETTER than the run of the mill names, right?

I have the feeling that these people were taken in by some nefarious consultant, who just opened a thesaurus and chose synonyms at random. Which I’d love to do, if the chance ever presented itself.

Imagine being in the boardroom with these people, and selling them on the most insane color descriptions you could think of. “Now this bright red here, it’s lovely, we’ve brainstormed, and what really captures the brightness, and redness? ‘Arterial Spray’! And this darker red, it’s for the ladies, so we were thinking ‘Menstrual Flow’ would be perfect! Don’t you just love it?

“Now, for this green, we’re a little torn. It could be ‘Mold’, but then ‘Gangrene’ works equally well. You all kick it around, and let us know, ‘kay? For the two black colors, well, this shiny black can only be ‘Oil Slick’, and this matte black, ‘Frostbite’! Because it’s the same exact shade that people’s fingers and toes and noses turn when they’ve become trapped on Mt. Everest! Really, compare this shirt with these pictures from National Geographic.

“Lastly, this lovely gray-blue color, we were thinking of ‘Dead Baby in a Plastic Bag’! Isn’t that a fabulous?”

It’s been suggested to me that I might have gone a bit far with the last color. Would it make it funnier if I said the dead baby was wearing a clown suit?