In this episode: How colors got their names, and a strange way to write. The terms blue and orange arrived in English via French, so why didn’t we also adapt the French for black and white? • Not every example of writing goes in one direction...
Centuries ago, monks who took a vow of silence developed their own hand signs, with hundreds of gestures, that are still in use today. Plus, how do speakers of different languages distinguish similar shades and tints of colors such as red, yellow...
How do we agree on how to name shades and tints of colors? A famous study in the 1960s, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Bookshop|Amazon by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found that if a language had only two color terms, they were...
A father and son are having an ongoing discussion about which came first — the color orange or the name of the fruit? The citrus got there first. The original name of this fruit comes from Sanskrit naranga, or “orange tree.” A German...
Why does English derive words for some colors, such as blue and orange, from French, but not words for other colors, such as black and white? A fantastic resource about the history of colors is Kassia St. Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color...
Right off the bat, it’s easy to think of several everyday expressions that derive from America’s pastime–including “right off the bat.” The Dickson Baseball Dictionary catalogues not only those contributions but also...