As the leaves begin to fall, leaders show their true colours

Ian Warden

Canberra Times

0
18.04.2026

"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 stronger than sweet William - called also gaiety".

She goes on to say how bewilderingly difficult, perhaps how impossible it is, really, to satisfyingly define colours with mere words.

"Colour is so maddening, so beguiling, because what we think we know about colour contradicts how we experience it. Rainbows occur only when physical conditions are right - water particles suspended in the atmosphere at the right density, cloud cover broken enough to allow light to reach those water droplets, eyeballs turned skyward to perceive - but try to grab a rainbow, and nothing's there.

"White and black, which we are accustomed to thinking of as not colours, are actually all of the colours of the visible spectrum either entirely present and bouncing back at your retinas (white) or entirely absent and being wholly, greedily absorbed (black)."

"Combine the hardwired connection between a colour sensation and the name we give to that sensation," she continues, "and the complexities of understanding how the external world, our bodies, and our brains somehow produce this sensation we call blue - and you get a lot of weird claims about colour.

"Did you know ... that the ancient Greeks couldn't see blue, because they had no word for blue? Did you know that we didn't see orange until the fifteenth century when the word 'orange' came into English?"

Kory Stamper's is the latest of the many sobering reminders for those of us who lead wordy lives that words are inadequate to the point of pointlessness.

Shakespeare, our language's greatest wordwright, insists on this again and again. The sincere and genuine Cordelia knows that mere words can't express the emotions of her love of her father, Lear, and so only says to him "I love you more than words can wield the matter". Hamlet, tortured by feelings, despairs at having to "unpack [his] heart with words".

I hesitate to compare myself to Hamlet the prince of Denmark but as someone who has always earned his living by writing, often by the writing of heartfelt opinions, I do know how it feels to be always unpacking the heart with words. As Hamlet says, it is somehow never good enough, never satisfactory, all this unpacking of the heart with words. Indeed (to deepen my entanglement in the jungle of words) the problem with trying to unpack the heart with words is that nothing does get unpacked. The heart stays bulgingly full.

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As the leaves begin to fall, leaders show their true colours

Ian Warden

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