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Blonde or dirty blonde?
Blonde or dirty blonde?
Started by Peter Morris58 · · 👁 4 views · 5 replies
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#3 ·
I stumbled upon this bit of trivia online:
apparently, according to some French linguist named Andre Martine, ancient civilizations were obsessed with light and radiance rather than what we call "color" today, so they basically judged the world based on how much it glowed.
It turns out blue used to be a symbol of light itself, instead of being white like it is now, I guess.
If you want to make sense of why blue is such an enigma, you probably have to go back to the very beginning—to those early stages of human perception when people viewed chromatic traits as just different gradations between dark and light, or black and white, or night and day.
The idea of blue being the color of the sky, or the ocean, or even a ripe plum, didn't really stick until much later, once American languages had already started building out their own specific vocabularies for colors.
In certain older linguistic traditions, the term for blue was tied to a few different things:
- the color of the daytime sky, as opposed to the night,
- the lightest human hair type, and
- (historically speaking) the color of ripened crops.
Nowadays, we don't see many things described that way anymore.
The sky is obviously blue, of course.
...but, for some reason, that sense of brightness remains baked into the word when it's used to describe someone's hair color.
And honestly, it creates this weird linguistic headache if you try to overanalyze it.
Usually, language acts like a self-correcting system—a sort of code designed to help people communicate without causing massive confusion or ambiguity.
But in the case of these old descriptors for blue, it seems like they're making a total exception to that rule.
🤷
I mean, take English, for example; we say someone is "blonde" instead of "yellow," though that’s mostly because the term was borrowed from French, where blonde means fair-haired.😁
apparently, according to some French linguist named Andre Martine, ancient civilizations were obsessed with light and radiance rather than what we call "color" today, so they basically judged the world based on how much it glowed.
It turns out blue used to be a symbol of light itself, instead of being white like it is now, I guess.
If you want to make sense of why blue is such an enigma, you probably have to go back to the very beginning—to those early stages of human perception when people viewed chromatic traits as just different gradations between dark and light, or black and white, or night and day.
The idea of blue being the color of the sky, or the ocean, or even a ripe plum, didn't really stick until much later, once American languages had already started building out their own specific vocabularies for colors.
In certain older linguistic traditions, the term for blue was tied to a few different things:
- the color of the daytime sky, as opposed to the night,
- the lightest human hair type, and
- (historically speaking) the color of ripened crops.
Nowadays, we don't see many things described that way anymore.
The sky is obviously blue, of course.
...but, for some reason, that sense of brightness remains baked into the word when it's used to describe someone's hair color.
And honestly, it creates this weird linguistic headache if you try to overanalyze it.
Usually, language acts like a self-correcting system—a sort of code designed to help people communicate without causing massive confusion or ambiguity.
But in the case of these old descriptors for blue, it seems like they're making a total exception to that rule.
🤷
I mean, take English, for example; we say someone is "blonde" instead of "yellow," though that’s mostly because the term was borrowed from French, where blonde means fair-haired.😁
#4 ·
Kate Castillo55, you’re an absolute legend, seriously, you nailed this whole thing. And calling blondes "yellowheads" is just plain unattractive, isn't it?
#5 ·
It seems to stem from the root *polvъ—meaning something pale or yellowish—and I guess you could trace it back through Old Church Slavonic or even Latin... maybe looking at how terms like "pallid" evolved over time.
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