I am writing this in Southend, out here on the Thames Delta, where the shit-coloured river meets the stone-coloured sea. In times past, it is said, this would be a slow change from a colour someone on the shore could see, to a colour they couldn’t. Recent research suggests that some cultures didn’t have a word for the colour blue until surprisingly late in their development, which led to such famous terms as “the wine-dark sea.” Now, they might have fancy blue wine up the road in London, but out here on the Delta dark wine is still red, and the Thames is still kind of shit-coloured most of the time. In those early cultures, there simply wasn’t a word for “blue.” And so, in a way, blue didn’t exist. That said, there are cultures that, for instance, have so many words for green that they can identify shades of green that we can barely differentiate.
We can’t see something until it has a true name that we can invoke.