Somewhere in history, we must have had an official who assigned colors to human moods and sprinkled colors into phrases. A member of the color guard, maybe?
Red is the drama queen of the colors. When you "see red," you are visibly angry and might lose control of yourself. The phrase comes from the idea that something you dislike immensely sparks emotions, and your blood seems to bubble up. My blood, all of it Italian, does that at times.
Your cheeks turn red because you're embarrassed or you're hot. Both reflect extremes.
As with many words, red is used in phrases to suggest something else.
A "red-letter day" is a special day. The term was used as early as the 15th century, when scribes marked holy days with red ink.
When a business is "in the red," it's losing money. The phrase comes from the practice of using red ink to indicate losses on balance sheets.
Today, "caught red-handed" means you're found doing something wrong. It originated from being caught with blood on your hands in the act of killing a person or animal. I guess if we were Vulcans, the phrase would be "caught green-handed."
"Yellow" is a bit more specialized. It's slang for cowardly.
Countless bullying cowboys in Westerns, seeking to provoke a fight, hurled the insult, "What are you, a yellowbelly?"
A coward also apparently has a yellow streak down his back.
The origin of tying the color to the lack of bravery is uncertain.
When an infectious disease hit the United States in the mid-18th century, it was called "yellow fever" because jaundice was a symptom of the virus.
"Yellow journalism" was a newspaper phase in the late 19th century. Writers and editors who practiced it used false, sensationalist language to sell papers.
The origin of the "yellow" part is odd. One newspaper at the time, The New York World, ran a comic titled "Hogan's Alley" that had a character who dressed in yellow. The New York Journal hired away the artist for that comic, and The World then found a different artist to create another kid who dressed in yellow.
This escalating drama of people dressed in yellow came to define the competition between the newspapers. The term "yellow journalism" came to be a description that people said with a sneer, which seems just.
"Blue" is malleable in the English language. A person feeling blue is gloomy.
"The blues" is melancholy music that America's black people brought with them from the rural areas to urban areas in the early 20th century. W.C. Handy, who helped popularize the music form, said, "The blues were conceived in aching hearts."
But blue has non-sad connotations.
"True blue" is what a good friend is. This term may come from the cloth dyers of Coventry, England. Their blue material had a reputation for staying the same color even after the cloth was washed.
In 18th-century Scotland, members of a group loyal to King James IV wore blue badges. "True blue" then became synonymous with unbending loyalty, which is what I always look for in a friend.
Describing a bruised person as "black and blue" is visibly accurate.
A "blue blood" is a person from an aristocratic family. It's a direct translation from a description of Spanish high rank, "sangre azul."
And the "blue-plate special" is a discounted entree at a diner. The phrase arrived in the early 20th century, when these meals were served on blue plates with sections that separated the meat from the vegetables and the bread.
"Green" also covers a lot of ground. Green can mean inexperienced and not yet mature. It can describe people and produce.
A sickly or nauseated person is "green around the gills." This is funny because most people don't have gills. I couldn't find the origin of that one.
"Green" is slang for money, which makes sense because American paper money is green.
And "green" has become the word to describe practices that aim to protect the environment.
The emotion associated with green is jealousy. William Shakespeare may have originated the tie. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia describes the force of "green-eyed jealousy." In Othello, Iago calls jealousy "the green-eyed monster."
WEEKLY REVIEW
The missing second comma is among my top punctuation annoyances.
March 24, 2002 was a great day because Randy Newman finally won his first Oscar.
Shane MacGowan lived in County Tipperary, Ireland for the first six years of his life.
The all-important second comma is missing in those two sentences. People always forget it. A comma goes before a year and after it. Or before and after a state, country or planet. As my old copy editing professor Buck Ryan says, "Once you open a door on a comma, you have to close it."
March 24, 2002, was a great day because Randy Newman finally won his first Oscar.
Shane MacGowan lived in County Tipperary, Ireland, for the first six years of his life.
Sources: American Heritage Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, The Free Dictionary, The Phrase Finder, PBS, Biography.
Email:
bkwordmonger@gmail.com
ActiveStyle on 06/11/2018