“Purple is Blue!”
Damn. Every year Suntory drags out these same old plastic purple roses and calls them “blue.” Wo0t! And why do you think the roses are always shown behind glass?
AFP – Thu May 11, 8:39 PM ET—The world’s first “blue roses” developed by Japanese brewer Suntory are seen during a press preview for the Rose Show as part of the World Rose Convention in Osaka.
As my friends here in Tokyo sagely observed, “the glass filters out certain forms of light that would make the roses appear to be a different color” and Rob Pongi said:
War is Peace / Freedom is Slavery / Ignorance is Strength
Green is Blue /and now/ Purple is Blue!”
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May 12th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
My friend Charles just reminded me that:
May 12th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Yeah, I don’t get the whole blue/purple thing. That just doesn’t make sense at all. When I lived in Japan, I remember the same thing occurring with traffic signals. Everyone would say, “The light is blue, let’s go.” At least the blue/green confusion about signal lights is understandable. Purple is purple though!
May 12th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Blue and green are the same color to Japanese, “Ao”, so green traffic lights are described as “ao shingo” that is Japanese Ao/blue=green and shingo=signal, ha, ha.
Wikipedia has the full story, but it is still weird that Japanese mix the use the word green “midori” and blue “Ao” all the time.
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Distinguishing “blue” from “green” in language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some languages, such as Vietnamese or Tarahumara usually do not use separate words for green and refer to that colour using a word that can also refer to yellow or to blue. In Vietnamese, blue and green are denoted by xanh; blue is specifically described as “xanh like the sky” and green as “xanh like the leaves”.
Modern Japanese has words for both green (緑 midori) and blue (青い aoi adj.; 青 ao n.), although the boundaries are not the same as in English. Ancient Japanese did not have this distinction: the word midori only came into use in the Heian period, and at that time (and for a long time thereafter) midori was still considered a shade of ao. Educational materials distinguishing green and blue only came into use after World War II, during the Occupation: thus, even though most Japanese consider them to be green, the word ao is still used to describe certain vegetables, apples and vegetation. Ao is also the name for the color of a traffic light, “green” in English. However, most other objects — a green car, a green sweater, and so forth — will generally be called midori. Japanese people also sometimes use the English word “green” for colors. The language also has several other words meaning specific shades of green and blue.
….The modern Chinese language has the blue-green distinction; however, another word which predates the modern vernacular, qīng (青), is also used. It can refer to either blue or green, or even (though much less frequently) to black, as in xuánqīng (玄青). For example, the Flag of the Republic of China is today still referred to as qīng tiān, bái rì, mǎn dì hóng (”Blue Sky, White Sun, Whole Field Red”); whereas qīng cài is the Chinese word for “green vegetable”.…..
May 12th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Ah, thanks for the follow-up wikipedia article. Makes sense now — sort of!