Colour me crazy
K HENSANI Mabasa inspired this column with a letter in which she says: “I am fascinated and alarmed by the phrase ‘a black language’. What is black about language? Maybe I lack understanding of this ‘white language’.”
It is a bit of a ridiculous term, if you think about it. If we classified all languages according to the perceived colour of people who speak them, Italian would be something like a “darker-toned-in-the-south-and-lighter-in-thenorth-although-that’s-all-become-mixed-up-so-you-can’t-really-tell” language. Scandinavians on holiday in sunny places would speak a painfully red language. Back home in the long, dark winter, they might be speakers of a blue language.
If I pepper my conversation with words such as sustainable and biodegradable, is that green language? And if I employ the vocabulary of camp (Cilla for a cigarette and Dora for a drink), is that pink language?
The politics of pink, incidentally, are complex. In 1914, US newspaper The Sunday Sentinel published this advice for mothers: “Use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.” In 1918, the Ladies’ Home Journal agreed that pink, “being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Later, possibly due in part to the pink triangle homosexuals were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, pink changed gender and became feminine. Today it has been reclaimed by men of all persuasions.
But back to black. Black humour is when people make light of tragedy. It’s an effective and underrated coping mechanism but some people are offended by it, so I won’t give any examples, not even the one about the one-handed man hanging from a cliff with an itchy bum. Oh, lighten up.
White lies are those told with supposedly good intention, though their consequences may be as bad as those resulting from mauve or tangerine lies. Yellow-bellied refers to either a poisonous Antipodean snake or a coward, and a grey area is one in which all or none of these things may be true.
How did yellow come to signal cowardice, red anger and green envy? The last two are easy — because Shakespeare made it so — but according to the online etymology dictionary, no
one knows why yellow became the colour of scaredycats. Perhaps because it rhymes with bellow (in fear) and marshmallow.
“Few words enter more largely into the composition of slang, and colloquialisms bordering on slang, than does the word BLUE,” wrote philologist John Farmer in 1890. Blue blood, blue moon, blue chip, blue collar worker … Blue movies may not have been around in Farmer’s day, but blue laws against lewdness were enforced by the puritans of New England, and that’s where the modern slang for pornography comes from.
Words of colour are coloured by the perceptions of those who use them, and sometimes applied in ways that might seem off-colour. But as readers frequently point out, language is constantly in a state of flux, and one man’s red herring might be another man’s pink elephant.