(Excuse the Canadianist spellings)
I’ve noticed a lot of creatures and plants with colours in their names are not named properly…for example, a Red Snapper (fish) is really a bright orange, a Blue Spruce (tree) is kind of purplish-green, a Blue Heeler (dog) isn’t blue at all, and Brown and Black bears appear in each others colours all the time.
What’s the deal? Did we have less colours in recent English history or are we just really crappy at naming things?
This is an interesting read.
By and large, I’d say we are crappy at naming things.
One reason that “orange” in particular does not turn up in a lot of names is that the word is a relatively modern one. This is, I believe, covered in one of the Straight Dope collections; the color is named for the fruit, which began to be imported to Europe a few hundred years ago. Before then people presumably got by with saying things such as “reddish yellow” and “sort-of vermillion”.
Then again, orange seems to be a sort of “orphan” of the color spectrum: the Golden Gate Bridge is painted international orange, the “black boxes” which contain flight recorders are typically orange, and the “blue books” which list used car prices have orange covers.
‘Pink’ is similar; it was first used to describe frilled edges (on cloth etc), then because certain species of Dianthus had frilled petals, they were named ‘pinks’, after that (and because the Dianthus flowers are pale red, it entered into usage as the name of a colour. Before this time, people made do with ‘Pale red’ or ‘white flushed with a little crimson’.
…which is why zig-zag scissors are called ‘pinking shears’…cool, I never knew that!
yes