Did you know that Orange was not a color (at least in English) until the 1500s?  It's true (at least according to the internet).  I went and checked because a thought struck me while walking around yesterday:  Why is a robin "redbreast"?  Or, to tie it to the photo below, why is the blackbird "red-winged"?  To my mind they've always looked orange.  It got me to wondering if color perceptions had changed over time or if it was a linguistic issue.  Turns out it's the latter.  Until the 1500s, the spectrum went red - yellowred (or redyellow) - yellow.  The word orange was imported into the language from French, which got it from Arabic, which got it from Sanskrit.  By that time, though, the robin was already called redbreast, presumably because it is easier to say than redyellow breast.

I wonder what other apparent anomalies are out there that I've not noticed.

red-winged blackbird