Crayola — Politically correct since 1962

Actually, the revisionism in color names began four years earlier than that, in 1958, when "Prussian Blue" was changed to "Midnight Blue" because of teachers' complaints that students were clueless about the history of the Baltic kingdom.

1962 marked the beginning of real political correctness, however, with the "voluntary" name change by the Crayola company of "Flesh" to "Peach."

The company acknowledges on its website that this was done "partially as a result of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement."

The next change occurred in 1999 after teachers complained that "some children wrongly perceived that the crayon color 'Indian Red' was intended to represent the skin color of Native Americans."

It became "Chestnut."

Crayola colors came in eight colors when they were introduced in 1903: black, blue, brown, green, violet, yellow, orange and red.

A box of crayons cost a nickle.

Today there are 120 colors, including:

Inch Worm

Jazzberry Jam

Tropical Rain Forest

Manatee

Bittersweet

Razzmatazz

Richard Morin, in his "Unconventional Wisdom" column in the August 14 Washington Post, wrote about a series of experiments carried out by Elizabeth G. Miller of Boston College and Barbara E. Kahn of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to see if people responded more positively to ambiguous color and flavor names or to more specific ones.

Their findings appeared in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Long story short: people overwhelmingly preferred things with vague names, whether it was food, clothing or anything else.

Why does ambiguity sell?

Miller and Kahn speculated that, without real information, consumers try to understand why the product has such a jazzy name and fill in the blanks with imagined desirable qualities.

Sounds a lot like love.

Oh, yeah — I almost forgot: that's a picture of an inchworm at the top of this post.

What color do you see?