Recently, I spoke with a female friend in the midst of planning out the repainting of her apartment. All the rooms would be white on three walls, she told me, with the fourth a different color in each. She then proceeded to list off the colors for various rooms – the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom – hoping to give me a sense of what the final results might look like. And while I nodded my head in understanding as she went through the list, expressed appreciation for the keen visual sense it clearly evidenced once she had recited through them all, I must admit I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

In short, we guys suck at color names. Sure, we might be able to tell you that ‘cerulean’, ‘periwinkle’, ‘aquamarine’ and ‘robin’s egg’ are all shades of blue; but if you were to line up four color samples, there’s not a chance in hell we’d be able to figure out which is which.

The problem, I suspect, stems from our Crayola’d youth. While most girls had the six-thousand crayon pack (the one with the little built in sharpener), we guys had the eight crayon standard. Inevitably, we’d even lose one, and not know the name for ‘orange’ until our early teens.

At which point, even if we were to studiously review every crayon out there, we’d still be doomed to fall horribly behind. Because, once high school rolled around, girls began to pore through the J.Crew catalog, the Banana Republic or L.L.Bean. And while we were just beginning to wrap our minds around the difference between ‘orange yellow’ and ‘yellow orange’, girls were contemplating ‘heather’, ‘oatmeal’ and ‘burnt sienna’.

Sure, a few lucky guys have caught up – graphic designers, for example, or professional painters. But even for them, I suspect it’s a bit like learning a foreign language; no matter how good your Swahili, you’ll never truly sound or think quite like a native speaker.

In other words, for even our best and brightest, we guys are pretty much a lost cause. We’d blush with embarrassment about it, but, frankly, we’re not entirely sure what color we’re supposed to turn.