It wanted to be associated with the proletariat not the ruling class.
McCarthyism
So, this is kinda weird, but general colors didn’t have names for a long time. Like in Greek texts by Homer he describes the water color as dark wine color because the name “blue” wasn’t a word. So it’s possible when they named a “red onion” purple wasn’t a color and considered a shade of red.
Also as others have said purple was the color of royalty and they didn’t want an association.
It’s kind of wild when you learn that words for blue are relatively new in human language.
I started thinking that it kind of makes sense as blue is not a common naturally occurring color and then I remembered the sky.
A lot of old writing refers to the sky and the sea as green.
What color did they say the grass was?
Cant have pesants eating royal onion now can we?
What really gets me is that the compounds responsible for this hue in food are called “anthocyanins” which means “blue flower.” I can’t even.
Because the dry outer skin is a rich red colour
Purple is just an up jump red aimed at royalty
in hungarian it’s purple onion, you just choose the wrong language :)
in portuguese too
At least we aren’t hungary all the time
also, take my upvote
Because they are only purple on the inside. Do you think apples are white? Or bananas?
Yeah, but you cannot convince me that watermellons are not red.
Humans are red so why not?
That’s a different variety than my local grocers. Stores near me, the papery outside it brown the red flesh you see there is dark purple for us.
From what I know, it has to do with the word red covering the purple part of the spectrum long ago, and the “need” for the word purple came out later but purple things that were named red didn’t get renamed.
You can look at japanese right now and 青い covers both blue and green, with a relatively recent addition of 緑 to cover only green (thus possibly pushing 青い in the future to be only blue, who knows)
Obligatory: https://youtu.be/gMqZR3pqMjg
Well whys it called Shepherds Pie when it doesnt contain shepherds, or Cottage Pie when its nothing to do with cottages or cottagimg? How about that one…checkmate!!!
And baby powder is never powdered babies!
I was similarly let down.
Oh shit! Shouldn’t have made my own. Although it is quite good sprinkled on my salad…
Similarly, the red fox is clearly orange, but English speakers were exposed to that species of fox before developing a word for that specific color. For bonus linguistical oddities, ‘orange’ was used for the fruit before it was used for the color.
And the fruit’s name is different from other countries’ names for it because “a naranj” was misheard as “an orange” and it stuck. Yellow-red wasn’t much adopted, though it did exist. Such is language, what a fun collective hallucination.
Or the red squirrel, which is brown.
And red hair.
Yes, the word for greenery/foliage, 青葉, translates to “blue leaves”
Also the green traffic light is called blue
I already knew this about colors (it’s also why “redheads” have orange hair) but I recently dug more into how the musical spectrum and how tones are defined is very similar in it’s cultural variance. Another thing is how the cardinal directions are divided radially and how time is counted. Shit counting bases even, most of the imperial measurements are based on either base 12 or base 16 math.
Wild to think that something you grew up with as a fundamental fact of the world might actually be super culturally subjective.
For bonus points, terms for colors are developed differently but similarly in separate languages: see e.g. ‘Color term’.
Jess and Rob on Words Unraveled talk about color word origins, and their discussion is illuminating about the cultural variance in perception of color. Now I am at peace with all the seemingly weird color names for things.
For a quicker tour, Vox talks about the order that languages fill in color words as cultures begin to refine their distinction.
I’ve always hated the “blue, indigo, violet” end of the English words for the rainbow. I only recently found out that the 7 colours of the rainbow in English is especially BS.
At the beginning of Newton’s time, there were thought to be 5 colours in the rainbow: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Newton added Orange and Indigo because he thought (for spiritual reasons) there should be 7 colours. There were 7 days of the week, 7 planets (known at that time), 7 notes in the (western) musical scale, etc.
But, Newton’s blue isn’t our blue today. For newton, the colour “blue” is what we currently call “cyan”, so the 7 colours of the rainbow were really red, orange, yellow, green, cyan (blue), blue (indigo) and violet. That makes a lot more sense.
But, there really could be arbitrarily many colours in the rainbow. We could have “rust” as a colour, in between red and orange, or “gold” in between orange and yellow. We could even have a spectrum that didn’t include “green” but included “lime” which is between today’s yellow and green, and cyan on the other side, and no “green” at all.
An orange is about the only thing correctly named
Yeah that’ll happen when you name the colour after the fruit.
Blueberry 🫐
Am I a fucking joke to you?
Wait till they find out that some cultures didn’t have separate words for green and blue
Because purple isn’t a colour
It’s the absence of colour your brain cannot interpret so it makes a purple.
I doubt whoever named it knew that though
why do we call green grapes white
Or purple grapes red?
(I’m guessing due to the type of wine they make)
Table grapes have learned from the chameleon.
Don’t even get me started on ‘white’ people.
Meanwhile stupid USians subscribe to the literal 19th-century ‘scientific racism’ theory that has ‘Caucasian people’ as something other than deeply tan skin that Caucasian people actually have.
They also don’t look at the last half of the word too closely.
You mean the word ‘Caucasian‘? Sorry, but that’s probably unrelated to ‘Asia’. Folk etymology is fun, but always falls apart in practice.
Grapes don’t make wine, silly. They’re inert.
Source?!
when i say “red grapes,” i’m always referring to the ones that are actually red because they have the most satisfying snap when you eat them.
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Who calls green grapes white…?
Never heard that happen
two examples: white wine, white grape juice. both are very common. seems to refer to the juice color, not the color of the grape skins.
when they’re made into raisins, they’re called golden raisins. so “white” isn’t even the only one.
Never heard about green grapes. Here in Germany they are called “white grapes” and EN-Wikipedia is also calling them that in english. We are also talking it “white wine” and so on.
Might be different in other languages, but English usually divides grapes into red and white for color.
The fuck it does
White Wine
That’s only because the wine is whitish. Nobody calls the grapes themselves white. And she squeeze the juice out the juice isn’t the same color as the skin. I’ve never heard anyone refer a grapes as white grapes
Pink balls
We’re talking about grapes?
In English, grapes are green or red.
Wine is not a grape. White wine and red wine refers to the color of the wine. Nobody calls vodka golden because it came from a potato.
Which part of the world are you from? I’m in Canada, and we call them green grapes and red grapes
https://www.safeway.com/shop/aisles/fruits-vegetables/fresh-fruits/grapes.html?sort=&page=1&loc=3132
Meanwhile Wikipedia notes ‘“Black” (dark blue) and “white” (light green) table grapes’
US. When I go to my local grocery store, they’re categorized under white or red.
At least for white, that is indeed how the English Wikipedia classifies different grape cultivars, even ones that aren’t intended to make wine. Black is new to me though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana_(grape)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almeria_(grape)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italia_(grape)
Might just be that my grocery store is real local and they do it differently. I try to avoid large chains. But I’ve always understood white and red to be the technical classifiers of grapes, and the actual color you see with your eyes varies.
I’m also from a wine-producing region, so maybe that has something to do with it as well.
It refers to the communism of the onions
Like ogres?
We’re all pink on the inside
