Not too long ago, I found that hydrogen, a nominally colorless gas, comes in multiple colors. The color indicates its source or how it’s produced.
black H comes from coal
grey H comes from methane/natural gas
green H electrolyzed from water using renewable electricity
blue H is from coal or natural gas, but the CO2 is captured and sequestered. (blue hydrogen, also called blue gas, does not actually exist, but its promoters pinkie-swear they’ll get around to sequestering all that CO2 any day now. Yeah, right…)
There may be others that I can’t think of right now.
Russians and Belorussians? The latter means “white Russians,” called this not due to whiter skin, but from some complicated historical political-cultural designation, somewhat like “red” for communists…or consider the Irish song “My mother she was orange, and my father he was green.”
I live in a “purple state,” in terms of political preferences…you could say states don’t “normally come in different colors.”
Hospital emergency codes. California has standardized with:
BLUE for adult medical emergency
GRAY for a combative person
GREEN for patient elopement
ORANGE for a hazardous material spill/release
PINK for infant abduction
PURPLE for child abduction
RED for fire
SILVER for a person with a weapon and/or active shooter and/or hostage situation
WHITE for pediatric medical emergency
YELLOW for bomb threat
Green sounds pretty romantic. Oh, wait, it’s not that kind of elopement…
As a grade schooler, our library had a reading program where there were color levels. Once you read x number of Green books then you could progress to Blue books, then Orange…*
BeforeI knew about the program, I was confused by a kid holding up a book with a purple cover and saying “This is a really good green book, it’s cool, you should read it.”
.
*Even at that age it really bothered me that the colors weren’t in proper ‘Rainbow Order’.
I’ll take a wild-ass guess and bet your grade school reading program with colors was the old SRA business.
Being a Boomer, I saw first hand how school districts had to deal with a tsunami of kids. School districts would trot out all kinds of new ideas and availability of so many “test subjects” made PhD candidates practically wet their pants.
SRA had color groups, with a number of stories in each color. After reading the story, the student had to answer questions. Now the student was supposed to slide a piece of paper down the right hand side of the question page, covering up the answers.
Supposedly.
The theory was, the kid would get an instant positive reinforcement if the newly revealed answer matched what the kid wrote.
Hell, we all cheated. The teacher didn’t oversee any of this. The bright kids were racing through all the stories in a color group, to obtain bragging rights on the playground.
My first grade class, the teacher had a color for everything. The days of the week were of colors on her giant calendar. Monday was red. It bugged me.
But I swear in my head when I think of a day in the week I see her colors.
BTW, white is not a color, it’s a lack of color. …sorry for the Thread shit
Linguistically, black and white are color words. And for the purposes of this thread, they’ll count as colors too. But you need more than two color words applied to some colorless thing to count as multiple in this thread.
My mom was a primary grades schoolteacher all her life. She divided the kids into redbirds and bluebirds according to their reading level, using colors instead of other designations like fast or slow, group one or two. The intention was to avoid stigmatizing kids by using a benign name, although they quickly figured out what the groups really were.
…sorry for the Thread shit