This week: Which came first the eggplant or the aubergine? More importantly, is eggplant purple really purple or just kinda purple? Let's get into it.
Purple Eggplant / Eggplant Purple
My daughter and her best friend have begun to realize they have different English words for things. Both girls are biracial but my daughter is American while her best friend is English. As they get older, and begin to internalize their senses of self, these small questions of identity and belonging take on slightly exaggerated importance, usually centering on their experiences overseas and with the impact different cultural ephemera impart on them1. Which make for the sort of earnest conversations that every adult in the room strains to overhear.
Sometimes these conversations result in a game of sorts:
Best friend: "Daddy, what's this?"
Dad: "An aubergine."
My daughter: "Papa, what's this?"
Me: "An eggplant."
Both girls: "An egg that's a plant!? That's so weird!"
They're not wrong. It's kinda weird. Of course, they're too young to care about the long history of nightshade cultivars, their ambiguous origins, and the different routes the names eggplant and aubergine took in becoming part of the English lexicon2. Instead, when they ask why there are two words for things, they accept patented Dad Answer No. 6 - because sometimes there are two words for things.
Normally, that'd be the end of things. But I've never met a joke3 I could leave untouched and so, for the past few months, I've been declaring things to be colors other than what they are. What I mean is, when my daughter got a new toy, she told me it was light blue. I said, "Not sky blue?" Which then became a quick run of other kinds of blue until I had to take it too far and say, "maybe sky green." To which she responsed with a deep sigh and a weary shaking of her head, "Daddy's joke."
This has become an on-again, off-again running joke in our household but it's also had the effect I wanted, she's learned that, in English, as in Japanese, we often describe a color by associating it with something recognized as being that color: fire engine-red, banana-yellow, sky-blue4. More importantly, unlike Japanese, there is no set answer, there is no right answer. You can use anything you like when you describe a color. Then I bought some new writing ink.
Ink companies like to come up with unique product names. In doing so, they sometimes stray from the path of righteousness. I mean, I'm all for Pink Sugar Beach and Main St. Marmalade, but what, exactly, does Oyster Hour5 refer to? I'm not sure I want to know. Or how about "Flower Raft?6" Or, uhm, Writer's Blood7? But I asked her, what would you call the colors that we have in the box8? She's doing her research and says she'll get back to me. Someday.
Over the summer, my wife and my daughter decided to turn a patch of our yard into a vegetable garden. Lots of tomatoes, cucumbers, even some watermelons and a pumpkin or two. Oh, and eggplants. Lots of them.
Her: "Papa! Look!"
Me: "That's a good looking eggplant. Kind of a plum-purple, hmm?"
Her: "Daddy, it's eggplant-purple."
Me: "Violet-purple."
Her: "Daddy."
Me: "Purple purple?"
Her: (Sigh.) "Daddy's joke."
Here's the Challenge
Imagine that you, Reader, have been given the task of naming a new ink. The base color can be whatever you like, but what's your comparison? Are you going to go with something close to hand, like Faded-Denim Blue, or something more...exotic, like, Humpback Whale Nostril Grey? See you in the comments!
Shameless Self-Promotion
By now you all know about 91 Days and that it's photos; Week 9 has been posted and Week 10 will be up on Friday.
What you may not know is that I also write fiction. My story Ai, Robot, about an artificial person who struggles to follow her duty, is up on Amazon for $.99 USD or free if you are a member of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Since we're talking colors, it's always interesting to think about where colors come from. Not the ones we can see all around us, but the ones we make, the ones that get used to paint and tint the products we use every day. Here are three recent-ish stories about the discovery or invention of colors:
From the Archives
This is really pushing the idea of archives to new lows, but this week, I’m linking to a post from just a few months ago. Back in January of this year, I took a deep dive into what it means to publish a white paper instead of a yellow paper. Along the way, I found out that there is a whole rainbow of research papers in need of publishing. Take a look:
Not that they know that's what they're doing.
Really short version: eggplant and aubergine originally referred to two different varieties of modern eggplant. Eggplant referred to a white, egg-shaped version, while aubergine literally means "fruit of the eggplant" and comes to English through French. The Wikipedia page, aside from being a concise and reasonably accurate summation, actually has a picture of a white, egg-shaped eggplant.
Aside from dad-jokes being my gods-given right as a dad, we live in Japan and I'm the only consistent source of English in her life. That makes it hard for her to learn all the thousand and one unspoken rules of English we normally learn through the constant trial-and-error of conversation. And although we talk, of course, I'm hesitant to stop conversations midway to correct her grammar or vocabulary. That seems like a really good way to get her to stop talking to me. But jokes and games are memorable, for kids and adults. So the more of those I can bring to our talks the better. Unrelatedly, friends all tend to heave heavy sighs and shake their heads wearily when they talk to me, too...
What I mean here is that while it is certainly possible to describe a color by associating it with something in Japanese, the culture and the language have a way of settling that English doesn’t. For example, in Japanese, brown has become 茶色, which are the kanji for “tea” and “color,” while yellow uses 黄色, which is literally “yellow” and “color,” meaning that the descriptive words cannot be separated from the word color.
Real colors from Ferris Wheel Press.
Japanese name Hana-Ikada. It's pink.
Damnit. I really want this one. I think I’d like to go on some sort of zen mountain retreat where I could just sit in silence for a week with a swatch of colors and emerge, hallowed and beatific, bearing a whole bunch of weird new names for them.
Where we keep all the art supplies.
Why not inks named after classic drinks? Negroni brown. Lemon Drop yellow. Cosmo pink.
I'll never understand why such an easy word to write and pronounce like "aubergine" became "eggplant" in the US. Yall's English makes no sense.
No idea comes to mind for naming an ink, but this makes me want to share a strange color we have in France: "vert caca d'oie." It literally means "goose crap green" and is a sort of yellowish green. I spent years thinking this was slang but it seems to be standard French in the end.