FAQs

What exactly is this newsletter about?

Anything that has to do with color.

Why does this newsletter sometimes use words in other languages?

Every email is the work of original research. My research process is finding the answer wherever it may be. I had a professor, born in Madrid, who, after telling him that I didn’t read Spanish so I couldn’t read an article he suggested to me, told me to figure it out. “A researcher has to be able to research regardless of the language. 

I will try to translate every relevant word, but I do believe that it is important to show the context. In situations where I am quoting a paragraph of text and translating it, I want to allow readers to tell me that I completely missed the point or misunderstood.

How has technology helped your research? Has your process changed?

When I was in graduate school, online databases were being born. To be able to sit at home and find downloadable PDFs of fully searchable medieval and early-modern books, dictionaries, and more, is really incredible. I still love going to academic libraries, but to be able to wake up one morning with an idea, and have a half dozen sources to consider by my first cup of coffee, it’s amazing.

I am very cognizant that I’m finding sources that people would have never seen 20 or 30 years ago, unless you were in a specific university library and knew exactly what you were looking for.

For example, after reading an encyclopedia entry written by Voltaire that I did not agree with, I was able to search for the earliest references to what he was talking about. I noticed a 1560 version and a 1615 version of the same book (after the author had already died), and was able to notice where they changed minor but important words. I realized that if someone would have read that in 1650, from the second version, they would have thought that the author used the language from the second version.

When you say that this is all original research, what do you mean by that? Do you not use Wikipedia at all?

I *am* writing a newsletter in 2024, I do sometimes use Wikipedia and Wiktionary, as a starting point or as a random reference that I know is there. I will look at many different online sources, to gather standard contemporary state of understanding, and see espoused theories and realize that none of those answers satisfy me, so I go to the primary and secondary sources to understand not only what actually happened or why something means what it means, but also, why people made the mistake. 

You seem not to like the standard etymologies you find anywhere… What's your problem with them?

Folk etymologies tend to be rather lazy and miss the bigger story. Fallacious etymologies are part of history, whether intentionally so or unintentionally so. Whatever happened to change the narrative, created a new version of history, and it is important to understand that as well. 

As a historian, I believe that it is important to first of all understand what something meant to its author, to its initial audience, to later audiences, and finally to the modern audience. As one professor said, “Don’t confuse Christ, Christians, and Christendom.” He was obviously Jewish.

It ultimately doesn’t matter if something is real or imagined, it can be true if it had an effect on how people saw the world. I can research religions that I don’t believe in, because I want to understand how people thought, and however religion has had an effect on how people have thought, spoken, and written for millennia.