Would you salute a flag of beige?

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Would you salute a flag of beige?

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Ho hum.

“There was a perception that life here was," said  Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago, of her institution,  "— I won’t say gray, that’s hard for me — but beige. “

Bland, blah, beige.  Beige is not a color likely to be hoisted up a flagpole for saluting. But the word itself has more interesting origins. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “beige” comes from “Old French ‘bege,’ perhaps from shortening of Old Italian ‘bambagia,’ ‘cotton wool,’ ultimately from Medieval Latin ’bombax,’ ‘cotton.” “Bombax” in turn was the root of “bombast,” which is “grandiloquent, pompous speech or writing” and a far cry from mildness of “beige.”

Few and far between are discussions of “beige,” but several employees of an in-house Spanish class were intrigued that the Spanish word for the color was an outright loan from French, right down to the soft “g” sound. Although English does have the “g” of “beige” in such words as “pleasure” and “measure,” that sound is entirely foreign to Spanish (and there is an easier-to-pronounce form of the word, “beis”).

So, here is a palette of more vivid colors (word origins from Walter W. Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language):

RED comes from Middle English “reed,” Anglo-Saxon “read.” Among its relatives in the Indo-European “family” of languages are Sanskrit “rudhira,” Greek “eruthros,” Latin “ruber,” Gothic (Germanic) “rauds,” Irish and Scottish Gaelic “ruadh,” Welsh “rhudd.” All these words came from a prehistoric ancestor that may have sounded like “reudh.”

BROWN: Greek “phrunos” (a toad) is a curious “distant cousin” of Middle English “brown” and Anglo-Saxon “brun.”

WHITE: The prehistoric word “kweit” (to shine) was the ultimate source of the Germanic words, Middle English “whit” and Anglo-Saxon “hwit” have Germanic siblings in Icelandic “hvitr,” Danish “hvid,” Swedish “hvit,” Dutch “wit,” German “weiss” and Gothic “hweits.”  From the same ancestor came Sanskrit “cveta” (white), Russian “svietluii” (light, bright) and Old Lithuanian “szweitu” (I make white, I cleanse).

BLUE:  Middle English “bleu” comes from Anglo-French “bleu,” which derives from Old High German “blao.” So, this is a case of one Germanic language (English) borrowing a word from another Germanic language (Old High German) by way of a Romance language (French).  Disguised by complex sound changes, Latin “flavus” (yellow) is indeed related to “blue.”

PINK, MAUVE and VIOLET came from the names of flowers of those colors.  The “pink” flower was known for petals that seemed to be delicately cut or peaked, as in the verb “to pink” (to pierce, stab, prick) and the noun “pinking shears.”

BLACK has an appropriately obscure origin. There is an uncertain connection among Middle English “blak” and Anglo-Saxon “blaec” and forms with meanings of “to burn” like Dutch “blaken,” Greek “phlegein” and Latin “flagrare” (as in “flagration”). A further link to English “bleak” is probable.

GREEN:  The relatives of Middle English “green” and Anglo-Saxon “grene” all fall within the Germanic language group. “Green,” as “the color of growing plants” is related to two other English words, “grow” and “grass,” through an ancient Teutonic root, possibly “gra” or “gro.”

YELLOW: Middle English “yellow” and Anglo-Saxon “geolo” have Germanic relatives (like German “gelb”), as well as cognates in Latin “helvus” (light yellow), Greek “khloe” (young verdure of trees) and “khlairos” (green), Russian “zelenuii” (green) and Sanskrit “hari” (green, yellow).  “Gall” (as in “gall bladder”) is another relative (Anglo-Saxon “gealla”), named for its yellowish color.

As for the confusion of green and yellow, Rowena and Rupert Sheppard (in "1000 Symbols: What Shapes Mean in Art & Myth" ) wrote that such shades can sometimes be cultural.  Green and blue, for example, are not as sharply distinguished as separate colors in Japan and China as in Western culture.

Photo: Remix of “The Flag of Texas” http://flickr.com/photos/sdbruns/6397659/ under Creative Commons license Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic. This use in no way implies endorsement by sdbruns.