Not Someone You'd Want At A Party

[bloodyrosemccoy]

St. Patrick’s Day

Camp Fire USA/Founder’s Day

Evacuation Day

National Quilting Day

Save the Florida Panther Day

National Day (Ireland)

 

You know you’re a linguistics major when you go out shopping wearing all blue, and when somebody reminds you that it’s St. Patrick’s Day and playfully demands to know why you aren’t wearing green, your immediate reaction is to think, “Look, dude, there’s a lot of languages out there that would agree with me that blue and green are close enough.”

 

If I were a history major, I would have thought, “The old traditional color of St. Patrick’s Day was blue!”  But I’m not, so you get yet another insight into how the whole famous business about naming colors works. Congratulations! You learned something new either way.

Comments

[principessar.livejournal.com]

what languages are you talking about? Now I am curious...!

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Mayan languages, Zulu. Japanese, Chinese, and Korean each used to have a single blue/green term, but that has changed. Some languages have different boundaries for blue and green--I think Celtic languages and a Middle Eastern language family, though I forget the specific one, describe some things we'd call "green" blue, and vice versa. It's actually a big field of study in linguistics.

[shadesofmauve]

Color naming is so facsinating. As a painter, the idea that you can stick with red, white, and black without immediatley feeling a need to name phalocyenine green yellow shade is just astounding. :)

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

LOL! Yay for linguistics majors! (I used to be one, actually...)

Incidentally, my mother (whose wardrobe consists almost entirely of pastels), makes a habit of wearing lavender on the 4th of July-- she claims she's wearing the traditional "red, white, and blue"... just all mixed together. Gotta love artists.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

It's orange if you're a Protestant, I believe. You are also obliged to get into fights with Catholics and vice versa.

[gryfindormia.livejournal.com]

Or if you were a purist history major (??) then you'd snootily remark that the modern St. Paddy's Day is actually an American creation, and nothing like what it really is celebrated in Ireland. And then you would immediately leave the party to finish up your gazillionth rereading of a Stephen Ambrose novel at home with the comfort of your cats.

But seriously, the history comms I subscribe to had at least five people each post some long diatribe about why they personally believe St. Paddy's Day sucks here, trying too hard to impress. I privately found it annoying.