It was towards the end of the 80s that I started seeing cars with metallic paint. They were colors that, to the eyes of a child from that time, were fascinating. An older boy told me that color was “turquoise green,” but another contradicted him, “it’s turquoise blue.” I didn’t know what to say. But the truth is they couldn’t agree on whether it was green or blue. It was a color in between, and we didn’t have a clear label for it. The confusion was total when another day another car appeared and a third person said, “what a great turquoise pink!” The cat was out of the bag, I thought. That boy identified the metallic effect with “turquoise.” So, who is right? The one who said “turquoise green” or the one who said “turquoise blue”? If we search online, we’ll see that both turquoise green and turquoise blue are used. Scottish Gaels lean towards ‘turquoise blue’ (‘tuirc-ghorm’) and the English, more pragmatically, simply say ‘turquoise’. How can it be that we see the same thing, but identify it differently?