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.