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In Japan green onions are called “blue onions”. I do not know why.
Japanese used to have no distinction between blue and green
Most people don’t have the distinction between blue and cyan despite the fact that it is the same distance as red is from yellow. :/
Team ‘red onion is purple’ reporting for duty 🫡 ‘Red’ is just marketing—someone at Big Onion is lying to us.
Maybe you all have color blindness.
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.
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.
Yes but not in English, which was my point
It’s the same reason why ”Violets are blue”.
Roses are red and violets are blue, You have been misled, for that isn’t true
Roses are red, but nobody cares, Waxed lightly weathered, cut copper stairs
See also: ‘robin red breast’ to describe the European robin, which very clearly has an orange breast:
Lil-red-throat in German
-chen und -lein machen alle Dinge klein.
~(It’s called Rotkehlchen. Proverb: Suffixes -chen and -lein make all things small)~
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”.
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.
Or perhaps Homer was colorblind?
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.
I was always curious about this! I’m bilingual and I always get mixed up because they’re actually called “purple onions” in Spanish. I always forget which language calls it which, but knowing this is definitely helpful!
In Bangla, we call the color peyaji, which is basically “onion-y”. It’s also what we call onion fritters, and they’re absolutely delicious.
Edit: Just remembered that we also use it as a slang for fucking around. Not sure where that came from lol.
Yum, onion fritters!
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!
Green onions are green but not onions!
In Japan they’re called blue onions - neither blue nor onions.
Not with that attitude
Red foxes are clearly orange. Black tea is clearly red. White grapes are clearly green.
Black tea refers to the visible degree of oxidation of the tea leaves - yellow, white and green teas all do the same thing. Similarly, white grapes are called that because they produce white (clear) liquid (though it’s clearly yellowish so they should really be called yellow grapes…).
Black tea refers to the visible degree of oxidation of the tea leaves
Makes sense
grapes are called that because they produce white (clear) liquid
Even if it produced indisputably white liquid. Why not call it after its own color while tea is named after the color of its processed leaves?
You’d expect tea which is thought of as a drink to be known for the color of the liquid, and grapes often eaten as is to be named after their color.
But it doesn’t really matter, any of these could’ve been named after whichever color they were at any point of their making / preparation. It’s not like there’s a convention or something
To make the tea thing even better, in English when referring to Chinese black teas, they are called red tea instead… Because that’s the color of the liquid.
That being said, if its label says red tea, its probably way higher quality than the tea bags you have at home.
Or it’s delicious, store brand rooibos
Read this roobois. Should call Australians that.
But rooibos isn’t tea - or did a joke woosh me?
You mean like how chamomile isn’t tea? Because I probably call chamomile broth “tea” 100% of the time. Tea for me is anything steeped in muslin in boiling or near boiling water that you might sweeten
AFAIK the thread was about green and black tea - and suddenly there was rooibos.
So I was more focused on the tea plant itself and the variations we get/make from it
I fuckin love rooibos, I don’t know what it is about it because I generally don’t care that much for tea.
I’m also not big on tea, but rooibos tastes like essence of baked goods to me
A black box is orange. A red panda is brown. A great white is mostly grey.
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.
In my language it’s called a purple onion
and the we call white onions red
No. They are maroon.
And maroons are escaped slaves that set up their own communities in the Caribbean.
No need to insult them
Are you calling me a moron?!
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.
Pickled red onions are next fucking level. They are so goddamn good its kind of crazy
Red onion skin is part of kids science experiments about PH. I just did that experiment with my kids not long ago.
Grapes, too.
Blue cheese is almost entirely creamy-offwhite coloured.
It at least has some parts that are a blueish green.
Yeah, my three years old kid really debating me about this. Insisting that it’s purple onions. Can’t really argue
Really blew my mind when I found out that red onions are just ripe white onions.
You’re thinking of bell peppers, not onions, they are distinct cultivars.
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.
WHAT!!
