colour words | Wordfoolery

Hello,

Between editing “Words Christmas Gave Us” (my next Wordfoolery book, releasing in 2024) this month, I’ve been working on my downloads for readers. Did you know I have a downloads page with free articles? I’ve created some wonderful ones for the Christmas release (not yet available, sorry) and I’ve started work on “Words People and Places Gave Us” for the same page. It will contain all the eponyms and toponyms I’ve stumbled across since publishing “How to Get Your Name in the Dictionary”, a sequel of sorts. As these downloads go live, I’ll mention it here.

One of those eponyms was the bellini. It’s a word Venice gave us. Sometimes we can forget that Venice was a hugely influential city state, but its influence remains in the English language. We have all of these words thanks to Venice – gondola, regatta, quarantine, zany, bellini, and carpaccio. I’d make a case for casanova too.

The bellini cocktail was invented in the 1930s or 1940s by Giuseppe Cipriani, the founder of Harry’s Bar in Venice. The drink mixes puréed white peaches and the Italian sparkling wine called prosecco, sometimes with a dash of raspberry or cherry juice to enhance the colour. Initially this was a seasonal tipple as white peaches are only in season from midsummer to early autumn, but now the peach purée is more widely available.

Cipriani named the drink the bellini because its unique pink colour reminded him of the toga of a saint in a painting by the 15th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini. Its variants are also eponymous. If you replace the peach with mandarin you get a puccini (Italian composer), a rossini (Italian composer) uses strawberry purée and a tintoretto (Venetian painter) deploys pomegranate juice.

Cipriani was an inventive chap. He also created carpaccio, the raw beef dish, which is named for Vittore Carpaccio, the Venetian painter known for the red and white tones in his work.

Now all I have to do is come up with an excuse to sample a bellini in Venice.

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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Hello,

I’ve been pondering the word history of colours recently. My previous posts about colours are still popular (Colour Rhymes, Mummy Brown, and Magenta). I enjoy painting with watercolours and it would be fun to work my way through my paintbox exploring the history of each name – burnt Sienna is named after the earth around that beautiful Tuscan town, for example. Words for another day, perhaps.

This week’s word, iridescent, is more of a swirl of various colours. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “showing many bright colours that change with movement”.

The best examples are found in the movement of nature – the glamorous sheen on the feathers of a starling or kingfisher, the shine of mother-of-pearl, the glint of the light caught on the wings of a dragonfly. Sadly I’m not a good enough photographer to have caught any of those glorious images with my camera lens so you’ll have to settle for the only iridescent items I could find in my home – my cuff-links.

iridescent (and a little blurry, sorry!)

Luckily the origin of the word is easier to capture than its visual image. Iridescent entered English in the 1700s to describe anything rainbow-coloured. It was coined from the Latin word iris (rainbow), although we don’t know who exactly came up with it.

Iris is also used in English for a family of gorgeous flowers which consistently fail to flourish in the heavy clay soils of my garden, and for the coloured part of the eye. It is always associated with bright colours.

That association doesn’t arise in Latin, it’s one the Greeks gave us and as regular wordfoolery readers know, where there’s a Greek origin, there’s nearly always a god or goddess hanging around looking for credit. Iris and iridescent is no exception.

Iris was the messenger of Hera, queen of the Greek gods. She was the personification of the rainbow and iris means rainbow in Greek (and in Latin as previously mentioned).

Iris traveled along her rainbow with the speed of the wind to bring messages to earth. She had golden wings to help her on her way. It’s not surprising that she traveled with the speed of the wind as she married Zephyrus, the god of the west wind. You may remember him from my post about the zephyr wind.

By the command of Zeus, Iris carried a jug of water from the River Styx, the river souls cross to enter the realm of Hades. She used this to put to sleep those who perjure themselves.

The element iridium is named for her. Sadly it is not iridescent. It’s silvery. It was discovered and named in 1803 by a British scientist called Smithson Tennant. He named it after Iris because many of the salts he obtained while working on the element were bright in colour.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling.

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. I finished July’s session of CampNaNoWriMo with 30,419 more words written of my ongoing serial “The Librarian’s Secret Diary” – the adventures of a new librarian in a small Irish town, working with her buzzword-spouting boss and her book-hating senior librarian. New episodes go live every Wednesday over on the subscription reading platform Channillo (you can try the first episode for free there).