Colours
Or, if you weren’t raised in Britain, “colors”.
This post isn’t concerned with the variety of colours but more the tonality of them. Words that infer colour rather than simply stating them.
In a previous post we looked at The Stroop Effect of words and colors – see it here – and wasn’t that just psychologically brilliant?
So the suggestion of colour or the state in which to find colour is what we are interested in here:
Diaphanous
Filmy; light; gauze-like. Delicately hazy – like a girl I once knew.
Crepuscular
Of twilight, when colours and often objects are distorted and confused. Dim and indistinct – funny, I knew a girl like that, too!
Darkling
Relating to growing darkness or the thrush in one of my favourite Thomas Hardy poems:
The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey, 
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Rubricate
A lovely word meaning to mark or colour with red. As in this picture, the choral manuscript has been rubricated, highlighting particular points. When I was at school, my homework was often handed back to me with severe rubrications. Just about every teacher marked one’s work with a red pen making it abundantly clear where one had stuffed up.
Tenebrous
Dark and gloomy like many of Charles Dickens’ buildings portrayed throughout his novels and
on film. Also, how I felt after receiving my rubricated homework back.
Sooty
Of a blackish or grey dusky hue. Very much unlike my favourite television character when I was
a little ‘un:
Sooty, with his, and my, pal Sweep. Say goodbye to the children, Sooty.
Ah, nostalgia … it’s not what it used to be.
