See also: ‘robin red breast’ to describe the European robin, which very clearly has an orange breast:
A small brown and white bird with a very orange chest perched on a branch
Comment on It's the truth!
Denjin@feddit.uk 21 hours ago
Red Onions (and every other not-red food that’s called red) is older in the English language than the word “purple”.
Purple is a relatively modern concept in English having first been used circa 900AD. Before that basically everything towards the magenta part of the spectrum was all just called red.
See also Orange, the colour is named after the fruit and not the other way round.
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 19 hours ago
Zwiebel@feddit.org 17 hours ago
Lil-red-throat in German
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Before that basically everything towards the magenta part of the spectrum was all just called red.
And before that we have people looking at colours entirely differently, like Homer calling the sea the colour of red wine.
Which my Greek teacher would explain by saying “my pencil is the the same shade of yellow as your book is blue”.
VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Or perhaps Homer was colorblind?
thomasloven@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
It’s the same reason why ”Violets are blue”.
kopasu22@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
The concept of purple is older than English, though. I guess when English chose to adopt it is the main question, but should be clarified that the term where “purple” derives from goes back to the ancient Romans, who recognized it as a distinct color used for royalty given the difficulty in obtaining it.
It does have me wondering exactly when red onions first arrived in the UK, because the variety is native to southern Europe. And I wonder what the Romans called that type of onion, which was surely used there before those dirty Britons got their hands on it.
I also know that, when boiled, they yield a very rich, red color. Could maybe be named “red” due to that? Some Orthodox Christians/eastern Europeans traditionally use red onions to dye eggs for Easter.
undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 20 hours ago
I was always curious about this! I’m bilingual and I always get mixed up because they’re actually called “purple onions” in Spanish. I always forget which language calls it which, but knowing this is definitely helpful!
SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 19 hours ago
In Bangla, we call the color peyaji, which is basically “onion-y”. It’s also what we call onion fritters, and they’re absolutely delicious.
AA5B@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Yum, onion fritters!
msage@programming.dev 16 hours ago
Wow, thank you!
Now when people call me color-blind cause I don’t care about color matching or their names, I can just say I’m very old fashioned!
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 10 minutes ago
Wasn’t purple a “royal” colour back in Roman toga times? Maybe it was called something different?