"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?" —George Orwell, 1984 The word police are shrinking the boundaries of acceptable language. The new freedom of speech is telling people what they can and cannot say. I came across a now-defunct Stanford University document titled 'The Elimination of Harmful Language,' which sought to purge words deemed potentially offensive. Among them were color-related terms: black box, white paper, yellow team. The justification? They “assign negative connotations” to black, “value connotations” to white, or reference “yellow” in ways that could be racialized. If language is preemptively scrubbed of all ambiguity—regardless of history or intent or actual meaning—what is lost? Would we strip language of its vibrancy, its poetry? Could we still say things in color? Idiomatic Color Wheel is an incomplete archive of “colorful language” before it vanishes. A rebellion against the narrowing of expression, it captures words that might soon disappear. Some may find a term offensive. Some may not. But offense isn’t the point. It’s a list. A poem. A color wheel. Words.
