When C&F was a child, his parents tried to describe how people can be misled by society this way: "Suppose you had been told your whole life that the color blue was really 'green.' It doesn't matter how many times you heard it was blue, you'd still think of it as green."
So what do we do now, when we find out that the color we've all known as garnet ... well, wasn't garnet at all?
On the Primary Matching System color chart, which has 814 colors, USC is going from color 201 to 202. ...
The move is an effort to get "a truer garnet color," said USC's Chip Harvey, director of creative services for university publications.
"It's one of those things where, if you look in the stands, you'd see shades from red to garnet. What we're trying to do is get things a little more consistent," Harvey said.
So everybody buy the new merchandise. Not so the university and the licensing companies can make more money or anything. It's for consistency.
As it turns out, he threw those picks because he was confused by the color scheme.
This raises more than a few questions. For one thing, when did the university start using the wrong garnet? How, exactly, do we know what's the "right" garnet? What if it's really color 203? Or 200? And what will the children think if there's a new garnet every time they turn around? Will it lead them down the road to moral relativism and drug use? "All of the colors are screwed up here anyway, so let me get high and see really pretty colors."
And does anybody think South Carolina is going in the wrong direction?
Mississippi State uses color 202, while Oklahoma, Alabama and Southern Cal use 201.
I suppose this isn't too much of a catastrophe. At least until they tell us that Cocky is really a rare Brazilian turkey.