I, for one, welcome our new alligator overlords.

Though alligators and crocodiles share very similar appearances, these terms represent different classes of organisms. While crocodiles and alligators both belong to the same order of reptiles, Crocodilia, they belong to different families within that order (Alligatoridae and Crocodylidae).

Alligators are found only in North America and China, whereas Crocodiles are found in large stretches of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Central and South America. Alligators inhabit freshwater niches, whereas Crocodiles inhabit both fresh and saltwater niches.

English has traditionally divided the colors of the rainbow into seven different colors ever since Isaac Newton described it as being that way in his groundbreaking treatises on optics. It was his work that divided the color pattern made by splitting white light with a prism, the same gradient made visible when white light is refracted through raindrops, into Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet segments, and these are the terms that have long been taught to Anglophone children as being the names and order of the colors of the rainbow. Note, interestingly enough, the presence of a prism like Newton's in the work at hand.

When Nakatani mentions differences in color terms across languages, she's probably referring most directly to the work of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, who performed a wide survey of color terms across different language groups. They concluded that color terms are generally present in languages according to a certain hierarchy; that is, color terms tend to emerge in languages in a particular order, and languages with fewer color terms tend to group certain shades together that languages with more color terms tend to differentiate.

1950s West Virginia is so bleak love the setting

The newspaper seen in http://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/walk_wit_me_first_part#25 is the front page of the Los Angeles Times from October 4, 1957, the same day that Sputnik was launched. That marks the setting as being in the American southwest, somewhere in the Los Angeles Times distribution radius. The presence of Route 66 in http://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/walk_wit_me_last_part#38 (referenced as the "Mother Road" in that same page) narrows the possible locations even further, to coal mines in the Route 66 corridor in the Los Angeles Times distribution area. As near as I can tell, there weren't any active coal mines in that area around 1957, so I don't think we can be more specific than saying it's somewhere in New Mexico or Southern California. Potentially as far East as Arizona, I suppose. There are few other areas in the continental United States that would permit two adolescent girls to comfortably pass an October night under the stars wearing only nightclothes, with only each other for warmth.

Maybe Korea? That finished only four years before the story likely takes place.

http://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/walk_wit_me_last_part#1 , with the map of Korea labeled "Korean War," would seem to support this theory.