Sometimes I miss the pre-school days when yellow-green-purple outfits were considered fashionable. It's not that the clashing colors were acceptable back then because we were too naïve to form opinions about one another's belongings. It was that the colors made us cool. The more colors, the cooler; the most colors, the coolest (with our superlatives still fresh in our minds). And there was one possession that — if you were among its lucky owners — made you part of an elite class, the cool-hunters of cool, the envy of show-and-tell, color-possessors of the universe: the Crayola Big Box.
That sanctuary of colorful creation was the apple of every kindergartner's eye for a good reason. Home to our most coveted of colored crayons, the Big Box introduced us to exoticism in the form of Jazzberry Jam, cerulean, Laser Lemon and Mauvelous.
But it's the plainer colors that I want to talk about today because before we laid our hands on those 96 gems, there was a box of eight that stuck by our sides, and some of its content has unexpected stories to tell.
Take pink, for example. What do pre-schoolers know about pink? Probably about the same amount as most adults know about pink, which is that you make it by mixing red and white. But the color's name has little to do with hue and more to do with its other physical characteristics, specifically in relation to a flower called the Dianthus plumarius.
Colloquially known as the "pink," the Dianthus's nickname can be explained by one of two commonly accepted theories. The first is that it comes from the Dutch phrase "pinck oogen," which translates as little or half-shut eyes and describes the general shape of the flower. "Pinck oogen" also gives us the term "pink-eye" — which refers to the shape and not the color of the eye during conjunctivitis — and clears up the mystery behind the "pinkie" finger.
The second theory is that the flower's name comes from the verb "pink," meaning peck from the Celtic "pic." In this case, "pink" is a reference to the perforated edges of the Dianthus's petals.
Either way, "pink" stuck for the flower and was soon after applied as the word for the flower's color as well.
The curious relationship between the color and the flower "pink" leads us to another question: Which came first, "orange" or the "orange?"
The answer — like in the case of pink — is that the color came second and, not coincidentally, took the same path to England as the fruit did. Thought to have originated in Southeast Asia, oranges were brought to Italy by Arabs in the Middle Ages and then distributed to other European countries. Along with them came the Arabic "naranj" (a derivation from the Sanskrit "naranga"), which then transformed into the English "orange" through metanalysis, a funny tendency we have to redivide words, usually by shifting the "n" at the beginning of a word to the indefinite article that precedes it. Thus, we get "an orange" from "a norange" and "an apron" from "a napron."
And the rest of our good old colors? The ones that don't have tales of their own lend themselves to newer stories — like red. While it has somewhat of a lackluster origin, red is part of countless phrases and sayings, one of which — "in the red" — I've been hearing a lot of. Traditionally, accountants have used red ink to indicate a loss and black to indicate a profit in order to avoid confusion. This practice also lends its name to Black Friday, the day when retailers make a quick recovery from "in the red" to "in the black."
Apropos of Black Friday, when you embark upon your upcoming shopping missions, take some time to remember the colorful outfits that were so popular around the sandbox.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
