Unfamiliar colours 7: Crimson

 

Unfamiliar Colours Extra: Describe this tulip

I’ve been trying to think of a clever way in which I can show off the beautiful stuff growing in my garden on this blog without being completely off topic. So when the lovely Tulip ‘Prinses Irene’ suddenly flushed with colour this week, thanks to the rising temperatures, I had the idea to ask my readers to name all the colours that this amazing plant sports.

Your prize, if you live anywhere near me, is a tulip, of course! If you don’t live near me, I’ll send you a postcard of the picture.

Oh, and googling ‘Prinses Irene’ doesn’t count. Plant people and garden designers and flower arrangers fall over themselves with praise for her…

Edit: Anyone is welcome to take up this challenge!

Unfamiliar colours 6: Scarlet

What can I say? Scarlet is really one powerful colour. Like crimson (coming up soon), it is the colour of blushes and of blood and of sin.

• There’s scarlet fever, of course, formerly a disease to strike terror into the hearts of parents.
• There’s the Scarlet Pimpernel, a charming rogue who struck terror into the hearts of French Revolutionaries*.
• There’s Scarlett O’Hara (she of the emerald eyes), who used to strike terror into the hearts of Southern belles with handsome beaus that she might snatch away to add to her collection.
• There’s The Scarlet Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne’s grand novel about Hester Prynne, the woman who carries her shame (scarlet, of course) proudly.
• I personally like the Elvis Costello song “The Scarlet Tide“, written for Cold Mountain, the movie (in which a lot of blood stains the snow scarlet). The Alison Krauss version is also quite lovely. (Elvis Costello does the tuneless stuff on purpose, by the way)

Oh, and what is that purple doing among all the scarlet?

*plant geek annotation: The German word for Scarlet Pimpernel is “Gauchheil”. Don’t tell me you knew that, or that you ever consciously saw the plant.

Unfamiliar Colours 4: Spring Green

I’m cheating, of course, because nobody should have any trouble visualizing the exact hue of spring green, at least not anyone from a country that has a spring. But it is April, the month which is either the cruelest one or in which you get drenched by showers supposedly sweet, and if for once the sun is out on a Sunday morning, that’s the colour I see and want to write about.

The purple was included just to make me happy. Also, the whitish-green tulips are really called ‘Spring Green’ and I’ve got them in my garden. They won’t really show until May, though.

Unfamiliar colours 3: Purple

When people go purple, the emotion that goes with it is RAGE. In fact, “to go purple with rage” is a very common collocation. What’s fascinating about it is that colours are not the same in all languages. With purple, there are huge differences.

Let’s look at the returns for “purple”:

A very funky colour, and not one you’d necessarily associate with rage. Still, that’s what people mean when they talk about painting their bedroom purple or buying a purple dress.

And now look at the returns for the German “Purpurrot”:

I wonder how that happened.

Unfamiliar colours 2: Auburn

Auburn is a colour that is used almost exclusively for hair. And a very nice hair colour it is – a brownish reddish-brown. Using Montage-a-google to make an auburn collage isn’t easy, because there’s also a city called Auburn (where, no doubt, everyone dyes their hair auburn). I cheated and googled “auburn hair”.

It contrasts very nicely with pale skin, of course, which is why it suits vampires so well, I suppose.

Unfamiliar colours 1: Taupe

Explaining the exact hue of a colour word that has no equivalent in the learner’s language is a particularly tricky task. Of course, in the age of the Internet, help is at hand: Montage-a-Google. This great little application returns pretty collages of images that Google returns for a certain search word – very helpful with colours.

Why taupe? There’s a scene in Ocean’s Eleven in which Brad Pitt and George Clooney watch the nervous computer guy walking around in the secret hallways of the casino in order to hack into the system. The exchange goes something like this:

Brad: Why do they always paint hallways this colour?

George: They say that taupe is very soothing.

Judge for yourself: