"What shade of orange is Donald Trump?"

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Headline in Fast Company magazine - asking one of the great questions of our time.

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As if anxious to make up for the colourlessness of our prime minister, the leaves of the deciduous trees of the federal capital city have begun staging their autumnal pageants of colour.

This week on my walks in the deciduous forests of the National Arboretum, I made a shamefully drab contrast, in my sensible, dull broccoli-green trekking clothing, with the crazy, intoxicated Mardi Gras gaiety of the forests' foliages.

Perhaps our prime minister, who lacks any colour and any personality, feels like this when he visits a school and mingles with vivacious, characterful, multicultural children.

But I digress, because what I want to say is that this colour-packed pageant of Canberra's autumn coincides with publication of a new book, Kory Stamper's True Colour: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Colour.

It is attracting admiring reviews. Tantalising excerpts of it are up online and have duly tantalised your columnist.

Now I, as a columnist, a wordmonger with 900 words at my disposal in today's column, might have been about to try to describe the colours of the autumn trees I am seeing on my walks. But Kory Stamper seriously doubts such descriptions can wield the matter.

Ms Stamper is a lexicographer who writes and edits dictionaries. When hired to revise the mighty and magisterial Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged she fell into the treasure trove of the revered olde dictionary's definitions of colours.

She was professionally and personally entranced by them. Those entrancements of her included the Webster definition of begonia, the colour, as "a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see coral 3b), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and........

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