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Red Onions (and every other not-red food that’s called red) is older in the English language than the word “purple”.
Purple is a relatively modern concept in English having first been used circa 900AD. Before that basically everything towards the magenta part of the spectrum was all just called red.
See also Orange, the colour is named after the fruit and not the other way round.
It’s the same reason why ”Violets are blue”.
Before that basically everything towards the magenta part of the spectrum was all just called red.
And before that we have people looking at colours entirely differently, like Homer calling the sea the colour of red wine.
Which my Greek teacher would explain by saying “my pencil is the the same shade of yellow as your book is blue”.
Or perhaps Homer was colorblind?
Cultures around the world divide the color spectrum up in wildly different ways, which really highlights the absurdity of “color” being a real, objective property. There’s one culture (I forget which, somewhere in Africa) where all the “dark” variants of colors are called by the same name. Other cultures often combine texture and other properties into their words for colors.
The concept of purple is older than English, though. I guess when English chose to adopt it is the main question, but should be clarified that the term where “purple” derives from goes back to the ancient Romans, who recognized it as a distinct color used for royalty given the difficulty in obtaining it.
It does have me wondering exactly when red onions first arrived in the UK, or what the Romans may have called it (potentially before those dirty Britons got their hands on it).
I also know that, when boiled, they yield a very rich, red color. Could maybe be named “red” due to that? Some Orthodox Christians/eastern Europeans traditionally use red onions to dye eggs for Easter.
Wasn’t purple a “royal” colour back in Roman toga times? Maybe it was called something different?
It was “purpura” in Latin. OP said purple is relatively modern in English.
It was. It was the royal color because it was famously hard and expensive to make purple dyes out of sea snails.
The Latin and Greek speaking parts of the world probably had a word for purple by that point. Remember the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who would evolve into the medieval Anglo-Saxons were from around modern continental Denmark to about the modern Hanover region. This area didn’t really have the color purple all that much and frankly speaking Britain ain’t much better on that front, probably why it took till around the viking age to get a word for it since that’s when pan European trade started to pick up again to a large enough degree for purple dyes to start getting to Britain on a regular basis.
Yes but not in English, which was my point
Wow, thank you!
Now when people call me color-blind cause I don’t care about color matching or their names, I can just say I’m very old fashioned!
Look, man, I’m not concerned with what middle earth or Mordor or whatever can see, I’m here on the planet U S of A.
No. They are maroon.
No need to insult them
Are you calling me a moron?!
And maroons are escaped slaves that set up their own communities in the Caribbean.
If I pickle them in vinegar, they turn bright pink, if I alkalize them in baking soda, they turn blue, if I cook them slowly in butter they turn a deep brown color.
Red onion skin is part of kids science experiments about PH. I just did that experiment with my kids not long ago.
Pickled red onions are next fucking level. They are so goddamn good its kind of crazy
Grapes, too.
What really breaks my brain is that the pigment responsible for this purple hue are called anthocyanins. It literally has a root-word for blue in the name, even though that’s not the only color it can make.
Really blew my mind when I found out that red onions are just ripe white onions.
That is not true?
Just like a Granny Smith’s will never be a Fuji Apple. A Red Onion will never be a Yellow Onion.
Unless you’re making a joke about peppers. Peppers are the same plant.
You’re thinking of bell peppers, not onions, they are distinct cultivars.
Shitposting is an artform
Well ya got me, you want your hook back?
Green onions are green but not onions!
Not with that attitude
In Japan they’re called blue onions - neither blue nor onions.
Red onions are all RED!
I’ve never seen a red onion only purple but if I ever do see a red onion I guarantee it will not be purple.
Yeah, my three years old kid really debating me about this. Insisting that it’s purple onions. Can’t really argue
In Japan green onions are called “blue onions”. I do not know why.
Japanese used to have no distinction between blue and green
Blue cheese is almost entirely creamy-offwhite coloured.
Leave it to colorblind people to name everything color-related.
as a radical colourblind: colour is a construction of the mind. Colour names make no sense. The only thing that matters is contrast.
Color is in the eyeballs. The proteins in your eyes that react to different wavelengths of light produce the network of colors we see. Your brain processes the image but all the color signals are assigned by your eyes.
I believe there’s even lens tech that can help alter colors so colorblind can differentiate the colors easier if the colorblindness falls into certain variants.
BURN HIM!!!
And pretty much everything orange is named red.
