The Song Behind Today’s Review Title

We’re getting in the wayback machine and setting the dial to 1957 for the tune that gave us today’s review title. Put your cowboy hat on and get in a honky-tonk mood because the tune is George Jones’ classic country song Color of the Blues. The first time Jones recorded the song, in 1957, was for Mercury Records (he recorded it two more times as he changed recording labels. I guess he really liked the song).

The 1957 version features the fiddle intro that I always think of when I remember this tune. As a child I recall Jones’s songs often playing on the country music station that my dad’s radio was always tuned to in our house.

Jones may be most remembered for his marriage to and professional partnership with Tammy Wynette — she of Stand By Your Man fame. The couple married in 1969. Together they recorded seven albums of duets, and they were often referred to as the “President and First Lady” of country music (Wynette had a hit song called The First Lady in 1971). The two eventually separated, in part due to George’s alcoholism. Together and separately Jones and Wynette had several hit country tunes. She died in 1998, he passed away in 2013.

You can hear the 1957 version of Color of the Blues, here on YouTube.

Kory Stamper is a former associate editor for Merriam-Webster dictionaries and is the auther of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. For a time, she also was a presenter on Merriam-Webster’s online “Ask the Editor” videos. A true word-nerd full of “hard-earned vocabularic snark”, her writing in Word by Word was a pleasure to read. I gave it four stars on Goodreads back in 2018. Booklist called it a “spirited book about the science and art of making dictionaries. It is by turns amusing, frustrating, surprising, and above all, engrossing."

I’m happy to report that True Color is even more amusing, surprising and engrossing. In this book Stamper takes us on a deep dive into the definitions of color used in the Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. The Third, as she calls it, was published way back in 1961. During Stamper’s time there, Merriam-Webster began the work of revising the Third and it was then, she says, that her “love affair with color began”.

And so our journey begins. First, we take a deep dive into what exactly color is (how would you describe “green” to a blind person?). Then Stamper gives us a taste of the use of color words in the real world, where frustratingly different industries (dye, paint, fashion) use different words for the same color. And at last we arrive at the heart of the book where Stamper takes us through a history of the color definitions in Merriam-Webster dictionaries.

Lexicographers, it seems, are mostly overworked, detail-oriented folks. This is particularly true of those who work through the ranks to earn an editor’s title. In areas like color definitions, these editors reach out to acknowledged experts. In this case that would be another set of detail-oriented folks called color scientists. You might think stories featuring drudges characters like these, while they wrangle word definitions, would be boring. But in Stamper’s hands the quirky personalities shine, and their colorful stories come to life.

I flew through this book, and I think it will have wide appeal. Read it for your own inner word-nerd, and for the vocabularic snark, and care, that Stamper takes to reveal these fascinating stories of defining color.

RATING: Four and a half Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌠

OVERALL COMMENTS: Kory Stamper’s latest book is funny, entertaining and informative. Read it for your own inner word-nerd and the fascinating stories she reveals.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an advance reviewer’s copy of the ebook through NetGalley, and courtesy of the publisher Knopf. The book is available to the public starting today, March 31, 2026.

The other books on my nightstand over the last week:

ONE BOOK I’VE READ

I finished The Future Past by sh.chilli dreams that I mentioned last week. In my review on LibraryThing I called it an “unusual book” and said it “is lacking a coherent plot.” I also noted that LibraryThing and Everand both credit ChatGPT as editor, which may have something to do with the book’s shortcomings. Two Stars ⭐⭐

TWO BOOKS I’M CURRENTLY READING

I haven’t made any more progress on American Scoundrel, which as I mentioned last week has been on my To Read list for a long time. I will get back into it again this week.

I’ve just started The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell. The book was prominently displayed this past week on the desk of an American BBC video blogger whose US political coverage I like to follow (if you know you know). Anyway, that display reminded me that I had bought the book earlier this year and was eager to read it. At 360-ish pages of small print it might take a bit.

WHAT’S NEXT

Next week I’ll be reviewing The Subtle Art of Folding Space, the debut novel by the award winning sci-fi short story author John Chu. It’s blurbed to be a story of “generational trauma” wrapped up in a science fiction novel full of “unhinged physics” and “really good dim sum”. You can find a description of the book here.