10 Colour Names

A few weeks ago, this intriguing factoid popped up on the HH Twitter feed:

English had no word for the colour ORANGE until oranges began to be imported from the continent in the Middle Ages https://t.co/pVK6Y1JNvr

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 19 May 2016

It’s an interesting story, which we touched on again in this week’s YouTube video, all to do with the names and etymologies of 10 colours—including the perfect word to describe the perfect colour of a perfectly ripe banana (spoiler alert: it’s not yellow), to the reason why magenta is called magenta, and what connects a Tudor folk dance to a bowl of porridge and to a pile of goose droppings. Truly, it’s an embarrassment of riches.

But back to oranges. Yes, that fact above is completely true: the earliest record of an orange in the English language comes from the early 1400s; the earliest record of something being described as orange in colour, dates from as relatively recently as 1557. But things have been orange coloured since—well, forever. 

Take foxes, for instance. They and their orangey-brown fur have been around ever so slightly longer than the English language (a few hundred thousand years, give or take), which meant that writers in pre-orange-importing times had to get creative when it came to describing what colour they were. As in this line, from Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale:

His colour was bitwixe yelow and reed,

And tipped was his tayl and both his eeris 

With blak, unlyk the remenant of hise heeris;
His snowte smal, with glowynge eyen tweye. 

  

[His colour was between yellow and red,

And tipped was his tail and both his ears

With black, unlike the remainder of his hair;

His snout small, with two glowing eyes.]

With no word for the colour orange, Chaucer—writing in the 1390s—had to resort to describing the fox in terms of yellow and red. And things stayed like that for another century-and-a-half, until a connection between the colour orange and it’s corresponding fruit was made, and the English language finally gained a separate name for the second colour of the rainbow. (Shameless plug #4,229: there’s more on this in the HH factbook, Word Drops.)

So that’s that. But, just when you think English and it’s colours are all sorted, you find out this:

FRENCH PINK is the name of a shade of yellow.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 18 May 2016

Oxymoron

You probably already know what an oxymoron is—a terribly good figure of speech in which two contradictory words or ideas are juxtaposed for rhetorical effect. Like Shakespeare’s “witty fool”, Chaucer’s “hateful good”, Tennyson’s “falsely true”, Hemingway’s “scalding coolness”, Milton’s “darkness visible”, or Cameron’s “True Lies”. But you were probably already unconsciously aware of that. Like an open secret. Or old news.

A light heavyweight. And some dry ice.

But you might not know that the word oxymoron itself, appropriately enough, is an oxymoron. The oxy– part (the same as in words like oxygen, paroxysm and peroxide) comes from the Greek word for “sharp” or “acrid”, oxys. The –moron part (the same as in, well, moron) comes from the Greek word for “dull”, moros. So an oxymoron is literally a “sharp-dull” turn of phrase.

There’s something fantastically oxymoronic about oxymoron being oxymoronic. But it’s certainly not alone. That Greek word moros, for instance, is also the root of sophomore, the first part of which is the Greek word for “clever” or “wise”, sophos. So a sophomore is literally a “wise-dull” person. 

Similarly, if you play the pianoforte then you’re playing the Italian words for “soft”, piano, and “loud”, forte—the name was deliberately coined because the piano was the first keyboard instrument that allowed the player to change the volume of what he or she was playing. And the preposterous meaning of preposterous comes from the fact that it combines two entirely contradictory Latin words: prae, meaning “before”, and posterus, meaning “after” or “subsequent”. So something described as preposterous is literally as absurd as something that has its “before after”.

And then there are words like bittersweet, and speechwriting. The word bridegroom literally means “bride-man”. Firewater is an old name for strong liquor. And how can you really have a ballpoint when balls don’t have points? Or be a spendthrift when thrifty people don’t spend? And how exactly can you be wholesome? Feel free to add your own oxymoronic examples to this list. 

In random order, of course.