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Gallery: pick a word (January 2025)

January 18, 2025 / 34 Comments

Colour! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.

Paul Gauguin

If colour is the language of dreams, what about the many names we use to describe colours? Yes, we can say blue, red, green, yellow, pink, and everyone will have a mental image of each colour as it is named. But will we all have the same image? There are so many reds, so many greens, so many pinks … You get my drift!

But we don’t have to stick to such all-encompassing colour names, we can be much more specific. What about cerise or fuchsia, scarlet or crimson? For this month’s Pick a Word challenge Paula has given us five such words. Some of the ones she’s chosen are quite commonly used to describe a colour, but two were completely new to me and may also be to you. So as well as finding photos to illustrate the words, I’m adding some definitions alongside my usual brief descriptions.

This month my photos will take you to Nairobi, Gambia, Vienna, Washington State and Colombia. I’ve tried to include some at least that you won’t have seen in previous posts. My feature image you will have seen, in posts about our visit to Oaxaca in Mexico, but I’ve doctored the colours to make them a slightly better match for Paula’s choices. I usually create a black and white edit of one of my chosen photos for this challenge, but that seemed inappropriate given the colour theme this month.

CORDOVAN

Face of a young elephant

Wikipedia describes this as ‘a rich shade of burgundy and a dark shade of rose. Cordovan takes its name from the city of Córdoba, Spain, where the production of cordovan leather was first practiced by the Visigoths in the seventh century.’

My photo is of a young elephant at the David Sheldrick Orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya.

PUCE

Pigeon on a wooden beam

I’ve always thought of puce as a brownish pink; it was a popular colour for dresses in Regency times and is mentioned several times by Jane Austen. And Wikipedia corroborates me: ‘Puce is a brownish purple colour. The term comes from the French couleur puce, literally meaning “flea colour”.’ The article then goes on to show five distinct shades all described as puce by different sources.

I found it a bit challenging to distinguish between this and ‘cordovan’ above but settled on a lighter variation in this shot of a speckled pigeon, taken at Mandina Lodge in the Gambia.  

VERDIGRIS

Green dome and stone eagle

The paint manufacturers Farrow and Ball describe this as an ‘elegant copper green’. It takes its name from the copper carbonate deposits that form on copper, brass, or bronze surfaces. My photo shows a detail of the Hapsburg Palace in Vienna, Austria.

TURQUOISE

Rocky islet in a turquoise lake

Turquoise of course takes its name from the mineral, and is probably the most recognisable colour name in this set. My photo was taken looking down at Diablo Lake in the North Cascades, Washington State.

SMARAGDINE

Stone cross illuminated with green light

This was the other one (with cordovan) for which I had to check the meaning, so I turned to dictionary.com which defined it as ‘emerald-green in colour’. My chosen image is of one of the stations of the cross in the Salt Cathedral, Zipaquirá, Colombia, illuminated by an emerald light.

34 Comments

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