Roy G. Biv

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Comments

  • edited April 2010
    "Blue Movie" is a pretty outdated term, at least for US english-speakers. Has it persisted in Canada?

    In my experience, the color of sex has always been red in english. Like, a scarlet red.
  • edited April 2010
    Red is the colour of passion in French. That can include sex and blood both.

    Dashing > I actually only heard the expression in the Order of the Stick, when the Oracle says something like "I decided to go blue instead" after he made a sexual joke. That's when I googled it.

    I just found it interesting because blue also means being down in English, while pink is also used for being happy in French (to see the world pink) so I wonder if it means English is saying "sex is bad" and French is saying "sex is good".

    I remember something about colours in packaging, and how some detergent sold better due to the colours used that associated it with being clean or something.
  • edited April 2010
    Avistew wrote: »
    I just found it interesting because blue also means being down in English, while pink is also used for being happy in French (to see the world pink) so I wonder if it means English is saying "sex is bad" and French is saying "sex is good".

    Uh... Not really. The term "blue movie" (which I haven't heard of prior to you mentioning it) comes from the term "blue laws" which were laws that were based off of religious moral values, and porn was generally considered against that religious moral code. There's a lot of debate as to why they're called blue laws though.
  • edited April 2010
    Maybe because blue is the colour of Mary and a symbol of things that are pure and stuff?

    colours have political meanings too! Here, for France:

    Red: far left, mostly the Communist Party
    Green: the ecology party
    Pink: the socialist party
    Orange: the Modem, centre party
    light blue: the UDF (if it still exists) Center-right
    dark blue: the UMP, right-wing party

    Black: the anarchists. White: the royalists.

    It's interesting how many meanings we can give to colours.
  • edited April 2010
    Avistew wrote: »
    Maybe because blue is the colour of Mary and a symbol of things that are pure and stuff?

    Yeah except the people who supposedly coined the term were Puritans. Also, over here red=republican blue=democrats green=...green and so on and so on.
  • edited April 2010
    Avistew wrote: »
    Actually, I was thinking of it and I think very pale blue can be used for baby boys, yes. Although I'd still associate baby boy clothes more with yellow than blue.

    Interesting - where I live, the baby boy colour is definitely blue - pale or not so pale. While yellow is the favourite colour of one of my daughters.
  • edited April 2010
    Just to throw in another random trivia item, the human eye can see (distinguish between) more shades of red than shades of green. Scientists who study satellite vegetation maps use falsely-colored red maps, because it's easier to compare plant health between regions with reds.

    So that may be another reason why people use more names for shades of red than for other colors.

    Or maybe the people who made up the color names drank a lot of red wine in the process, and there wasn't a lot of green or blue wine available.
  • edited April 2010
    I thought the shades of red thing was because human skin is various shades of red, but I'm probably just making that up.

    Shades of orange, more accurately, but there's no real reason why orange should be considered such an important colour. Lots of languages didn't have a separate word for it. Including English.
  • edited April 2010
    Shwoo wrote: »
    I thought the shades of red thing was because human skin is various shades of red, but I'm probably just making that up.

    Shades of orange, more accurately.

    Really? When I was in art school the base colour for skin always was yellow. I guess we added some red to that, but so little... For me it was always more yellow than orange.
  • edited April 2010
    I don't know anything about paint mixing, but when I pick a pale human skin tone in a digital colour picker, I always use a lighter shade of orange.
  • edited April 2010
    Probably due to the medium difference, then :)

    I guess your way does make sense, though, since brown is basically a dark shade of orange, so that would cover more skin tones.
    Although yellow and orange are close to begin with anyways.
  • edited April 2010
    Even with light orange, you still use shades of red/pink right? Assuming we're talking about painting white folk, of course.
  • edited April 2010
    I always made a mnemonic device out of ROYGBIV with this: "ROY Got [/b]B[/b]ig In Vegas".

    Hey, it worked for me!
  • edited April 2010
    Avistew wrote: »
    Although yellow and orange are close to begin with anyways.

    Orange needs more respect!
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