Green, Blue. Old, New.

If you are uninterested in the future plans of Colorphilia, and are only reading this for the research, you can scroll down a bit and learn about that time when Voltaire was wrong, religious persecution and the evolution of French profanity, why I love the bridge scene from Monty Python's The Search for the Holy Grail so much from a history of color perspective.

You can also go to the new Colorphilia website and read a roughly ~500 word overview of many things I researched about the color cyan (blue-green) this year.

As the first year of Colorphilia comes to an end, I've become somewhat nostalgic of the first topics I spent months researching at the end of 2023. At the same time, I've spent the past seven months planning the next stage of Colorphilia in 2025.

Over the past year, I have written more than 100k words of original research about color. I've researched hundreds of concepts, perused thousands of primary sources in about a dozen languages, and have gone down countless rabbit holes, often getting stuck.

And as the son of an early subscriber told me about the conversation he had when his father first saw the 2500 word email - "he took one look and said no one is going to read all that."

I was almost as shocked that no one is interesting in reading a long, rambling newsletter about color as I was about discovering there was gambling in the movie Casablanca.

On the other side of the spectrum, a close friend recently relayed a conversation with a mutual friend: "She has a lot of friends with newsletters she never reads, and she reads Colorphilia every week."

Colorphilia Magazine no. 1 - The Green Issue

I'd like to announce Colorphilia Magazine. It will be a quarterly print-only magazine that will focus on a single color each issue. The first issue, hopefully, should be published in mid-March, around the time that the Chicago River gets dyed green.

Each issue will be comprised of a wide variety of content ranging from short-form tidbits, lists and recipes to longer features and interviews. And obviously, there will be art, photography, poetry, and short fiction. Even the longest piece will be under 1000 words, and unlike this newsletter, it will be edited (and it will mostly not written by me).

...for the curious.

As I was trying to figure out who the target audience would be, I was stumped. I was forced to rethink what I think Colorphilia is actually about.

The first thing is curiosity. Not "curious about color", but "curious" full-stop. Much like Communism in the movie Clue, color is just a red-herring. It's for people who are curious about... anything and everything. Every piece may not fascinate everyone, but most people should find enough they find interesting.

Anywhere we can, we will be making ideas more accessible.
There is a lot of crossover between alcohol and the color green, and there will be recipes for cocktails, but each one will also feature a complementary NA cocktail (or "mocktail") recipe, inspired by the original, not just a simple substitution.

You can't have a magazine about the color "green" without talking about Dr. Seuss, and a lot of people would never eat something called "Green Eggs and Ham" for a wide variety of reasons. Each recipe will also feature a complementary vegetarian version, which is an inspired interpretation of the original.

Color is uniquely human phenomenon.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Colorphilia is about humanity. So much of how color works and how language evolves is uniquely related to humans. Yes, nearly all animals have color perception, but humanity expands meanings well beyond the literal.

One example: during my research preparing for the Green Issue, I've been fascinated by how green is associated with "green as clean" in two ways that have absolutely nothing to do with other. "Clean" energy is is energy that doesn't contribute to greenhouse gasses ("green as the environment"), but there are also many green soaps, which are more associated with the concept of "green as fresh".

Written by, and for, humans.

Over the past year, as AI has become more prevalent, it has felt like a coda on a trend that I've been seeing for the past decade.

A perfect example is the previous sentence. I'm always terrrified of using a word incorrectly or imprecisely, so I sometimes I run a quick search to confirm that it means what I think it means. I don't want to do something silly and confuse "penultimate" with "final".

I ran a quick web search using DuckDuckGo and the first page of results didn't even realize that "coda" is a word and not a movie, software, or organization. On Google, I had to scroll for a while before I saw dictionary, and it still didn't provide the basic definition.

(From Wiktionary: it is from the Italian word for "tail". "[In music, a] passage that brings a movement or piece to a conclusion through prolongation. ")

Online content has become so SEO and SEM driven, which means that you may see a lengthy and unnecessary preamble, intending to convey to search engines that it is relevant. Relevance also means that if something was published 5 years ago, it's more than likely that you will not see it.

There is no need to debate the merits of AI-generated art or writing, it will just have no place in Colorphilia Magazine.

US Money is green.

I have some crazy ideas about how contributors should paid fairly and promptly, be professionally edited and laid out, and also about how this should be printed in the US and sold from independent bookstores, coffee shops, tea houses, boutiques, and the like.

To quote my mother, "how are you going to pay for this?"

Inspired by my grandfather who published a weekly magazine called "This Week in Pittsburgh", we will be seeking sponsorships from companies and brands connected to the color of the issue.

Whether a company has a literal green logo or product, or a metaphorical "green" process or material, there is relevance in the green issue. Instead of traditional advertisements, we will research and write an "advertorial" for each sponsor.

You can learn more about this by visiting the newly-rebuilt Colorphilia website. On the home page, you can also "play" a little quiz I made about many related pairings of green things.

(The site is brand new, and I haven't even shared it with my mother yet, so please give me any feedback or advice.)

Colorphilia Newsletter

The Colorphilia Newsletter will continue.

From the beginning, I’ve intended the Colorphilia newsletter not to be an end within itself, but a work-in-progress, rather a sort of research journal which reveals my, perhaps, unorthodox research style, and the variety of sources I study.

Throughout the year, I have tried to stay honest and update previous mistakes when I come across new data which contradicted earlier assumptions or conclusions.

Thank you for subscribing, reading, and for many of you, supporting this newletter and my research.

And now back to the regularly-scheduled research:

Sacre Bleu

To be clear, the French have not used the phrase sacre bleu or "holy blue" since before 1700, and even them it was considered to be a bumpkin or rural language. Still, for a variety of reasons, this is perceived by English speakers as a French profanity.

Bleu, which literally translates to "blue", is a minced oath. A minced oath is a word like "heck", which is used instead of saying "hell", or "gosh" instead of saying "god".

The word for God in French is dieu, so "bleu" is way to avoid using the name of god. There were many similar phrases used, including corbleu (from "corps de dieu", the body of), têtebleu (the head of god), morbleu (from "mort de dieu", the death of god).

This wasn't necessarily because people were so god-fearing. They were afraid of corporal punishment.

According to an essay by Voltaire, this particular minced oath goes back the 12th century.

There had had been a litany of blasphemy and profanity laws in France, beginning with Philippe Auguste (or King Philip II) who considered himself the first "King of France" (as opposed to of the Franks) around 1190. There would be a different punishment depending on it was your first time or seventh being accused of blasphemy.

Subsequently, King Louis IX, also known to Catholics as Saint Louis, the only canonized French king, or to Jews as the king responsible for the Trial of the Talmud and who burned the Talmud in 1240, created a series of even more harsh punishments for blasphemers. He also targeted the Cathars.

More laws were passed during the 16th century during the Protestant Reformation, and even more were passed during various points during the 17th century. During the final blasphemy and profanity expanded to include obscenity.

There is just one problem with Voltaire's claim. During my research, I realized that he was wrong. One of the great things about Google Books is that I can find scanned versions of books from different time periods. In the 16th century, popular works by François Rabelais featured similar phrases, with a slight change - the second word wasn't bleu, it was bieu with an i.

When the same books were reprinted after 1620-ish, the word was changed to bleu. This makes sense on many levels.

First of all, the colors inde and perse were much more common than the color bleu until the middle of the 17th century. Also, bieu had no meaning besides being a minced oath, so with increased persecution, it may have simply been a was to shift another step away from being perceived as using profanity.

But Voltaire didn't realize this because he likely had never read books printed before 1600. So he assumed that the phrase had always been -bleu.

Parenthentically, there used to be a concept that "the internet never forgets", but this too is obselete. I'm sure that there is some lesson we can learn from this related to modern technology and the internet, but I doubt we will.

New Blue

French wasn't the only language where blue evolved.

I have long realized that blue has never been a single concept, it is a word with many different roots. As I wrote about regarding Shakespeare (the 16th century writer), it could be connected to bloody and bloom, with the latter making it a catch all word for any color of flowers. A simple comparison could be made between the word-pairs of "growing and green and "blooming and blue".

But there was an even bigger issue. The original word for "color" in Middle English was blee, with bla, blo, ble, and blu (and more) referring to different colors, similar to how we saw in Welsh. In Old English, the word for "color" was blēo.

Which makes it even more likely that early uses of phrases like "sky-blue" means "the color of the sky", not "the shade of blue which looks likes the color of the sky".

Similar to Voltaire's confusion, when you peruse through blue in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will see that the quotes sources conflate most of these forms to be early uses of the color "blue".

And all of this ignores, that as late as Sir Isaac Newton, "blue" and "indigo" were different colors, with blue being a lighter shade. Indigo is the dye used to create the US flag of red, white, and blue, so it is a little funny that the color indigo has shifted to a more purplish color.

Blue and Green Confusion

In 15th and early 16th century German dictionaries, I discovered that blau (the German word for blue) meant a different color, and then shifted. It originally was a light green or yellow (and connected to the color wax).

And people wonder why the word "blau" in German also means very drunk. Something like "green around the gills" in English.

Oh, it gets better.

In the earliest versions of the myths about the Green Knight, one of the earliest "villains", the word used to describe him was glas, which was likely his eye color, connected with one of the first pieces I wrote about Glaucus and that time I learned Welsh colors. It's a blue-green.

The mistranslation caused people to start to wonder "what made him green?", and began to portray him in green clothing, and also green skin.

But did the concept of green skin as evil come from an earlier source (Genesis) and the villain (the snake) in the Garden of Eden?

And now, the "Other", whether witches, aliens, monsters, goblins, and more, are all portrayed as green. There are some technical reasons for this, but again, I would contend that there is a connection, however loose.

(The Green Issue will obviously feature pieces about all of these, as well as fairies, elves, nymphs, dragons, and more mythical creatures..)

The Color of Youth

Both "green" and "blue" have historical connotations with youth.

Green is associated with youth because of plants. While referring to pre-school kindergarten (literally "children garden") may be only a few hundren years old, the term nursery, originally used to refer to the room where a child was nursed, quickly also referred to the place where plants were tended.

In my piece on Glaucus, I pointed out how both French and Spanish had cognates in the word garçon or gars, which was associated with young blue-eyed boy, or misbehaving young man.

Perhaps the fact that a young man, coming of age (or "blooming") is associated with mischief, makes the color timeline of life starting with green, then blue, and ending in gray and white.

And people wonder how researching color could be so fascinating?

The Search for the Holy Grail

During tangent #1 in the newsletter about favorite colors I wrote (emphasis added):

There is a scene towards the end of movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” where, in order to pass the Bridge of Death, the old man from scene twenty-four the Bridge Keeper asks each traveler a series of five three questions. 

For those unfamiliar with the film, by answering any of the questions incorrectly, you are cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril, which was not good. One of the questions was “What… is your favorite color?”

As we saw above, the problem is that such a question is highly anachronistic and would have not actually have likely occurred during the Auth[u]rian period.

[...]

(Though Sir Galahad's response to the question may actually reveal an extremely deep understanding in the etymology of color, but that somehow makes this even worse.)

The transcription is the following:

BRIDGEKEEPER: Stop! What... is your name? 
GALAHAD: 'Sir Galahad of Camelot'. 
BRIDGEKEEPER: What... is your quest? 
GALAHAD: I seek the Grail. 
BRIDGEKEEPER: What... is your favorite color? 
GALAHAD: Blue. No, yel– auuuuuuuugh!

What makes this incredibly funny, at least to me, is two things:

1. As I mentioned above, blue was previously the word for yellow in German.
2. The storytelling of Aurthurian era is the same period that had Sir Gawain first fighting mistranslated The Green Knight. Color fluidity/confusion seemed to be endemic.