Learn English – the word for bright colors such as green

I found an interesting grammarian blog on this very topic. Essentially, the post avers that puce is dark purple, but acknowledges the false notion of a "puce green" still persists. (It's theorized that the term might be an adaptation of puke green, but also readily acknowledged that there's no strong evidence to prove that notion.)

Also, I found a dress on Ebay today that was described thusly:

This fabulous Chetta B size 14 cocktail dress is created in a gorgeous deep, rich eggplant purple with a shadow of puce green in a beautiful brocade that is 100% silk.

I suppose that would mean the dress in question is puce-on-puce?

Lastly, I typed "Puce dress" into Google's search engine, and then clicked Shopping; this is what showed up on my screen:

The conspicuously un-puce dress in the middle is being sold as used, so it might disappear from the search query results in a few days. However, it does present some tangible evidence that some people indeed mistakenly refer to pea soup green as puce green.

As for why such misperceptions persist and become widespread, it only takes one exposure to misinformation to lock it into one's brain. This reminds me of a friend who once related how, while working on a project in his garage, he playfully asked his daughter to fetch him a "sawdonkey", making what he assumed was an obviously humorous pun on the word "sawhorse". Problem was, his young daughter didn't know what that object was called, so she simply noted the reference, and tucked it into her brain. Several years later, she was working on a stage crew in college, and it took five or six people to convince her that the object in question was indeed called a sawhorse, not a sawdonkey – she even called her dad that night to verify.

I'm not sure I've ever heard of yellow traffic lights, but here are 65 written instances of "drove through a yellow light".

I assume it's a US/UK difference. To my British ear, "drove through an amber light" sounds natural, but there are actually only 7 of them.

Note that "ran a yellow light" gets 369 hits, against 23 for "ran an amber light". That stronger bias I put down to the fact that ran a red light is about ten times more common in the US than the UK.

I doubt anyone's choice of colour-word would be influenced by the exact wavelength/frequency of the lights themselves on either side of the Atlantic, but it's worth noting that the UK sequence is Red, Red and Amber, Green, Amber, whereas in the US it's just Red, Green, Yellow. The colour amber is often described as a reddish or brownish yellow. Perhaps British usage is influenced by the fact that half of all the times we see our "yellow" light, the red one is also on.

The official British "security alert" scale was headed by red, amber until it was replaced in 2006 (by an apparently non-colour-coded scale). The American equivalent has red, orange (yellow next).