Blue?

Blue?                     

By John W. Vander Velden

 

A rose is a rose is a rose, but not all violets are blue…

 

It occurred to me one day as I was mowing one of the lawns in my care.  While I worked on one particular section that was simply bursting with the small purple wildflowers.  The small blossoms revealing that spring had indeed come.  Jackie says it is only because the yard does not have thick grass and needs to be treated.  I on the other hand enjoy seeing the small purple smiling pansy-like faces, as I hew them off in my quest for green of a consistent depth….  But not all violets are blue.  There are violets with yellow blooms…others with white…and a few that have blossoms of purple mixed with white…Hmmmm….

Now, I considered, was the plant named after the color of the flower…or did the color derive its name from the common wildflower.  It becomes a “Chicken and the egg” kind of conundrum.

Violet, the plant…violet the color…and what has any of this to do with the price of cheese at “Sam’s Club”…not much actually.  But about blue…which is the point of this essay…perhaps a great deal.

Blue…to many a favorite color, the color of a crystal clear sky, the color of mirror smooth deep water, the color placed carefully on nearly half the newborns, a color found all around us, found on bicycles, cars, clothing is a very pleasing color.  Yet blue is also associated with sadness…depression…despair…and other “d” words that at the moment I cannot remember.  How can this be?  How can the color of the ribbon lovingly placed on a bouncing baby boy be depressing?  Unless of course you happen to be longing for a daughter.

Over the years “Blue” has become synonymous with sadness…the word not the color.  The sad blue has an entirely different root going back hundreds of years.  It is not the color’s fault that it shares its name with a particular mental state.  Society has often attached a new meaning to an existing word, just as using the name of a rectangle with equal sides is to describe individuals that are un-refrigerated, or an altitude term is used to indicate chemical inebriation.  The word “blue” and the color “blue” are not the same thing.

However, as writers, we might “multitask” words…allowing more than one meaning with the words we choose.  Colors often fit into that category…a writer might use, say, red as a color but also to indicate anger or white to express purity.  How words are “double-used” can be as subtle or obvious as the writer wishes.  But certain words…just by their use bring immediate concepts to the reader’s mind.  So perhaps it is for us to choose the word…rather than the color…for “blue” doesn’t have to be “blue”…. 

(463 Words)