greeny-blue? bluey-green?

March 14, 2018 10:34 PM

Glaucous, the Greeny Blue of Epic Poetry and Succulents, Katy Kellehe - "English has a lot of terms for blue-y greens and greenish blues, and some of them feel like arbitrary bullshit."

Blue–green distinction in language

Deep into Green

Neither Green nor its fellow books on colors have a strict through-line of argument. What they have instead is a guiding assumption: the history of color is indeed a history and not a kind of allegory in which each hue carries a fixed and single burden. In that sense all colors are uncertain, and not just green.

On Being Blue

It is not uncommon for color words to slide a little along the spectrum, so that when a word such as glaukos , often found in Homer, is applied to something gray in one context while in another designates a yellow or a blue, it may be because it is actually referring to something weakly changeable such as "water, eyes, leaves, or honey." Consequently, colors called blue sometimesweren't. Guilt or honor by association was apparently the linguistic rule, and blue kept bad company. Pliny said that Breton women painted their bodies dark blue (if you say so) when they were about to engage in orgiastic rites (no kidding), therefore blue was a color of shame and to be shunned by the decent (good to know).

posted by the man of twists and turns (34 comments total)

γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη
"glaukôpis Athḗnē"

the owl-eyed( grey-eyed(bright-eyed(wise))) Athena
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:39 PM on March 14, 2018 [9 favorites]

And then there is sinople, which is either or both red and/or green. The red association seems to come from the mineral of the same name, which is dark blood red. The green meaning seems to have come about from heraldry.

A curious example occurs in an early armorial of the Burgundian Order of the Knights of the Golden Fleece (Toison d'Or) where the arms of the Lannoy family are recorded as "argent, three lions rampant sinople, etc." Despite the fact that sinople signified a shade of red in early heraldry, the lions in this 15th century manuscript are clearly green, although rather faded. The fugitive nature of the green pigments of that day may have had some influence on the low use of that color in early heraldry.

posted by Athanassiel at 10:49 PM on March 14, 2018 [4 favorites]

Gruesome.
posted by clew at 11:29 PM on March 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

Hmm: Metafilter "dark blue" and "glaucous": never both seen together in the same room.
posted by rongorongo at 11:30 PM on March 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

Metafilte: bluey-green or greeny blue.
posted by batter_my_heart at 1:44 AM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

As Greek slowly morphed into Latin

Ummm. I don't think that's what happened, is it? I'm sure Latin acquired some words from Greek, but it didn't evolve out of Greek, which is the meaning that I take from "morphed into". That's the kind of detail that makes me wonder what else is wrong in an article.
posted by thelonius at 1:56 AM on March 15, 2018 [18 favorites]

dammit, this article made me curious... if green was so numerous in early human's surroundings, why didn't it as a colour concept come up in the early stages of naming colours?
posted by cendawanita at 2:05 AM on March 15, 2018

The fugitive nature of the green pigments of that day may have had some influence on the low use of that color in early heraldry.

my favorite heraldry comment

posted by leotrotsky at 3:29 AM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

Interesting. I've wondered before whether ancient accounts that seem to describe colours ate actually talking about something else, like intensity or saturation. For instance, there's the Greek myth of Hyacinth whose spilled blood was said to have engendered the flowers of that name. But hyacinths are blue, maybe slightly purplish but definitely not red. So maybe the flower has been mis-identified, or maybe not, maybe the feeling ancient Greeks got from a spray of brightly coloured flowers was the same as the feeling they got from a spray of blood on the ground. Or maybe not. But radical colour confusions like this in ancient sources are not uncommon, and many documents rely instead on dye names ("wool dyed with carmine") or comparisons ("wool like lapis lazuli"). Actual colour names are relatively rare. So maybe a lot of the things we tend to translate as colours should really be translated as "bright" or "sombre" or "jazzy", words that convey an impression, not a shade.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:01 AM on March 15, 2018 [8 favorites]

oinopa ponton to the bleen courtesy phone!

Fascinating stuff
posted by GeckoDundee at 4:06 AM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

> ...the arms of the Lannoy family are recorded as "argent, three lions rampant sinople, etc." Despite the fact that sinople signified a shade of red in early heraldry, the lions in this 15th century manuscript are clearly green...

For somebody who hasn't studied heraldry at all this would beg the question of color blindness.
posted by ardgedee at 5:03 AM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

I still thought glaucous meant shimmering, clearly I got most of my vocab from poetry.

Italian definitely has what I would classify as better boundaries between blue and green and I've always been curious as to why a pillaging language like English hasn't taken advantage of its many sources of words to more sharply define colors.
posted by lydhre at 7:00 AM on March 15, 2018

Glaucous is one of the many words I know because of botanical keys. It's that greyish-blue color you see on the underside of some leaves. My students are already tired of seeing the word in reference to blue spruces and some other needle-leaved things.
posted by pemberkins at 7:20 AM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

Glaucous gulls appear to be neither blue nor green.
posted by adamg at 7:22 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

I guess that's where the word "glaucoma" takes it's origin
posted by thelonius at 7:36 AM on March 15, 2018

While not blue or green, hematite is one that shocked me when I realized that its name is meant to refer to the red colour of blood as most of the hematite that I encounter is that silvery grey that is typically found in jewellery.
posted by sardonyx at 7:49 AM on March 15, 2018

The blue/green distinction has been a subject of interest for me for a long time. As the article notes, Japanese has a word that can stand for both, 青 (ao). Usually in isolation it's translated as "blue," (there's also 緑 [midori] for unambiguously green and 紺 [kon] for deep and unambiguously blue) but greengrocers, green lights, and underripe produce all use 青.

And I long wondered what the difference is between blue and indigo in ROYGBIV. Apparently those seven colors were chosen by Newton for symmetry with the seven major notes of the Western musical scale, not because of any innate quality in what is really a continuous spectrum. And apparently, the color that Newton intended to denote by "blue" was what we'd today call cyan, or…blue-green. His "indigo" is our "blue."

What confuses the hell out of me, though, is that when Japanese people talk about ROYGBIV, they refer to that color that falls in between green and indigo as "water-colored" (水色 [suishoku]), and "indigo" as…青.
posted by adamrice at 8:08 AM on March 15, 2018 [5 favorites]

OTHO
Viridian.

DELIA
Viridian. Now why do I
know that name?
posted by infinitewindow at 8:14 AM on March 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

And don't forget about the "wine-dark sea" that shows up all over the Odyssey and Iliad. Plus, apparently 52% of people think tennis balls are green.

So after looking at a color catalog recently ("Peacock Plume??" WTF) I've just decided to give up on requiring this to make sense.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 9:58 AM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

apparently 52% of people think tennis balls are green.

they ain't blue
posted by thelonius at 10:31 AM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

Joe in Australia, consider the crispèd curls of a beautiful and negligent youth, tossed by the wind over his forehead and cascading down the column of his neck like a bright stream over a rock ledge warm in the sun, fragrant as the ferns at waters' edge.

The popular name 'hyacinth' indicates a plant with open or reflexed tepals borne along the stalk, giving a rounded cascading shape of wild curls. They're usually fragrant. It is the shape of the hyacinthine bloom, not just the hue, that remembers Hyacinth.

I had a good seat in Humanities 101. Also, it's still garden-catalog season.
posted by clew at 11:18 AM on March 15, 2018 [4 favorites]

(“While the English language has 11 separate color categories—red, green, blue, yellow, black, white, grey, pink, orange, purple, and brown—the Himba have only five,” notes the New York Times. “That may be because their environment does not include as many gradations.”)

Oh come the fuck on with this nonsense, NY Times. The environment of England has more colors than that of southern Africa? Backing up, since when are these English words are conveying separate categories of color? Red and pink!? Orange and yellow? Gray and black?!
posted by desuetude at 11:43 AM on March 15, 2018 [7 favorites]

They are conveying different categories of color because if you take a big sample of UK English speakers and give them swatches of many many colors and ask them to categorize them, and then you look at the categories and the colors in each, and run some statistical tools, you can say that English has 11 categories of colors.

The fun parts come from looking at the colors that are harder to categorize.

Of course you'll get some people that put pinks and reds together, or who will use 100 categories.
posted by Index Librorum Prohibitorum at 5:27 PM on March 15, 2018

To me indigo is a bit purple.
posted by brujita at 5:53 PM on March 15, 2018

It is the shape of the hyacinthine bloom, not just the hue, that remembers Hyacinth.

That's a really interesting suggestion, but consider that there's a gem which is also called hyacinth (more commonly jacinth) which is reddish. And according to Wiktionary the Greek word that we received as "cyan" (κύανος) is "cognate with Hittite kuwannan- (“precious stone, copper, blue”)."

So Hyacinth dripped blood, and is immortalised in both a blue flower and a red gem. The Greek word for "blue" is cognate with one that can also refer to the red metal, copper. The words "cyan" and "Hyacinth" look related to me, but I'm no etymologist. I can think of other examples- Homer's famous wine-dark sea, for instance (previously).

I can come up with stories to explain each case: the hyacinthine stone was originally amber, not zirconia, and amber can be found in rounded lumps that are (a bit) like the bells of the flower hyacinths. Some compounds of copper are blue, and maybe they were used as gems or (finely ground) as makeup before smelting was invented. But this is all special pleading. My point is, there's probably a reason the ancients didn't find it weird that the same name would be used for something red and for something blue. To me, that indicates that their conceptualisation of vision was more "dull-bright/plain-gaudy/weak-vivid" than ROYGBIV. Later, perhaps as trade expanded, they found it useful to have more terms for colours. But you don't need the words "salmon" or "ochre" to describe a beautiful sunset, it's perfectly useful to describe it as a beautiful-bright-vivid thing.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:20 PM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

Hematite is so called because blood-red residue is left when the stone is cut or faceted.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 9:11 PM on March 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

So the flower we know as the hyacinth isn't the hyacinth that existed in ancient Greece to which the myth referred. One of the likely contenders for what the hyacinth actually looked like is scilla bifolia, but apparently the petals were meant to be marked with the letters "Ai" after Apollo's wails of grief. The scilla bifolia doesn't have anything like that. Other possibilities are the iris (though there are more than few varieties of those), larkspur (ditto) or fritillary. None of these have anything resembling an A or an I on their petals, though I have to say I am intrigued by the fritillary possibilities because it is so cool-looking and also is a colour that you could interpret as being like blood (reddish purple instead of bluish purple). But who really knows?
posted by Athanassiel at 11:37 PM on March 15, 2018 [2 favorites]

Currently-called-hyacinth (this is more like grue and bleen than I expected) is native to enough of the eastern Med that I'm surprised we can rule it out of the running, if the scilla are in.

Here's another fritillary in Anatolia that looks like blood to me, but not particularly bright, blue-green, or glaucous...

Copper being blue-green is perfectly understandable, though: " The commonly encountered compounds are copper(II) salts, which often impart blue or green colors to such minerals as azurite, malachite, and turquoise, and have been used widely and historically as pigments. " (Wikipedia)
posted by clew at 12:14 AM on March 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think the hyacinth most people are familiar with is the orientalis cultivar. The one you've got looks like a wild version of orientalis.
posted by Athanassiel at 5:28 AM on March 16, 2018

> Some compounds of copper are blue

Any oxidized copper is blue-green...?
posted by desuetude at 7:02 AM on March 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

Only the wild strain could be relevant to what the ancient Greeks were thinking of. And that's currently a hyacinth because that's it's Linnaean name -- given by Linnaeus himself, afaict.
posted by clew at 11:17 AM on March 16, 2018

Oh, you've got green eyes
Oh, you've got blue eyes
Oh, you've got grey eyes

Blue and green eyes get their color from the quality and quantity of light, not from pigment.
posted by ohshenandoah at 10:15 AM on March 19, 2018

That second link of yours says that the difference between green and blue eyes does in fact come from a difference in pigmentation.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:46 PM on March 19, 2018

Just going to follow on to adamrice's comment and say that yes, the same grue-some phenomenon occurs in Mandarin: 青 (qing1) is the 'grue' concept, though it's also the color of bruises and unripe produce; 緑 is modern green, and 藍 is modern blue.

My mother is not good at distinguishing between blue and green.
posted by batter_my_heart at 2:14 AM on March 20, 2018 [2 favorites]