The Color of Language
Last weekend Thomas and I had brunch with French friends at Park. Eating there is like dining inside a greenhouse, which is refreshing. The downside is that whenever I go there, all I want to consume is freshly squeezed orange juice, rosemary fries, and warm banana bread with butter. Which is essentially what I did.
At one point, our friend Alex described someone as “green with anger.”
“Really?” I replied. “Anger is green in France? Here, envy is green.” It all goes back to Shakespeare’s Othello:
IAGO: O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
(3.3.189-91).
Alex then explained that anger is green because when people are angry, they usually swear, and the use of lots of cuss words is “green language.”
“Huh,” I said. “Well, for us, cursing is ‘blue language.’”
It was then revealed that the French use ‘blue’ to refer to naughty, racy words—as in Ooh La La sort of stuff.
Which reminds me of a bad joke:
What do French cows say?
Mooo la la.
I tried to tell that to my French in-laws, and they didn’t get it…sigh…
In Israel, blue means racy too. For example, adult films are called “seh-ret ka-chol” (lit. ‘movie blue’).
Hmm…I wonder why…