WTN: cerulean
James Harbeck
cerulean
I sat down at the table in the park, just south of the art gallery, and I saw a little piece of heaven, just lying there, with no particular point, and how it got there was unclear. It might as well have fallen from the sky.
A little piece of heaven? A Prismacolor “Light Cerulean Blue” pencil. (Yes, cerulean blue is like pizza pie and tuna fishand so on: the definition of the first word includes the second.) Undoubtedly it was accidentally left by a student at OCAD University, the “pencil-box” building of which fills a part of the skyline above the park, or perhaps by someone younger who had been playing on the playground just metres away or in the community centre also just metres away.
Why heaven? Yes, the sky is blue, but more to the point, that is the point: cerulean comes from Latin cæruleus, which means ‘sky-coloured’ and is formed from cælum ‘sky, heaven’ plus the diminutive suffix -uleus (the first lrolled into an r: cæluleus became cæruleus). Which means that it is literally a little heaven – “heavenette” if you wish. Latin did not distinguish between ‘sky’ and ‘heaven’; the line “factorem cœli et terræ” from the Credo is typically translated as “Creator of Heaven and earth” but could as readily be rendered as “maker of the sky and the ground.”
Speaking of ground, the point of the pencil had been ground down – or anyway worn down through use – and needed to be sharpened, which is to say ground (or cut) to a point. But at least that meant it had been well used before I found it.
Which reminds me, as it may well remind many of you, of the classic “cerulean” monologue given by Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) in the movie The Devil Wears Prada:
This… “stuff”? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue. It’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner… where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact… you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”
The great insight from the speech covers not just that particular moment, nor even just the fashion industry, but how culture in general works. Including language. We happen on words with no particular idea how they got there, but there was a whole history that led to that moment, and there is nothing we can do to exempt ourselves from it, even if we are oblivious to it. The “plain meaning” of texts only exists because of millions of people over thousands of years borrowing, referring, changing, negotiating, and agreeing. Believing that what you see now and understand from it is the only real possible meaning – as many people like to do with some texts from ages past – is like believing that that sweater got into that bin for no particular reason, or that the pencil on the picnic table had simply always been there, or was placed there just for me so I might write this or perhaps scrawl my name on the table or draw heaven there on earth. And on the other hand, believing that certain specified older meanings of words are the only true meanings is like believing that the only true cerulean is Oscar de la Renta’s.
After all, de la Renta didn’t invent cerulean either. Who made the sky blue? Not Oscar.
But… the colour cerulean doesn’t exist because someone wanted a sky-blue colour and made it and named it as such. It’s not just that the sky comes in many colours, and only sometimes is what we call “cerulean” (usually it’s one of the many shades we call “sky blue,” and sometimes it’s no kind of blue at all). It’s that at the time the colour we call cerulean came around, things went the other way. The colour came first, and then they chose a word they liked for it.
In 1789, you see, a Swiss chemist named Albrecht Höpfner synthesized a pigment from cobalt stannate. It had a pleasant medium bluish colour, not as green as teal but not a pure blue either. For a time it was called Höpfner blue. But somewhere around the middle 1800s, an art supplier decided to give it a nice Latin-type name and called it ceruleum. Variations on the name abounded; it wasn’t until the early 1900s that the name came to be set as cerulean, which is what the artist and art theorist Max Doerner called it. It’s been used in many paintings, such as Claude Monet’s La Gare Saint-Lazare. Now it’s widely used, although often what’s called cerulean is no longer cobalt stannate, but just pigments, inks, or the RGB rays of your computer screen combining to the same effect. Have a look at the emblem of the United Nations: it’s in cerulean; the colour was chosen by the designer, Oliver Lundquist, as “the opposite of red, the colour of war.” When you think of the colour, you could think of any of these things. Or even of none of them.
And who knows what other artworks any artist who uses the colour is thinking of? Everything has references to other things, but sometimes they’re not intended by the creator, at least consciously. But the colour was there, so they used it. Just as the pigment was there and the word was there, so they put them together because it seemed suitable and attractive. After all, why did Oscar de la Renta choose cerulean?
He didn’t. The cerulean fashion lines referenced in the monologue never existed in reality. They were made up by the screenwriter for Miranda’s pocket disquisition. In fact, the monologue didn’t exist in the movie script either, at first. It started with a few lines by Miranda disparaging Andy’s fashion sense, which were then cut, but Meryl Streep asked for it to be added back and fleshed out. The writer of the screenplay, Aline Brosh McKenna, at first wrote just about blue, which had been chosen as the colour of the character’s sweater because it would work well on screen. But then she realized that a fashion maven would use a more precise term, so she presented Streep with several words for kinds of blue. From those, Meryl Streep picked cerulean. Did she know how that word got there? What its origin was? She might have; she’s Meryl Streep, after all. But perhaps it was just there, like a left-behind pencil, and it served the purpose. It does have a nice sound to it, even if you don’t know all the other references it has and the history of the name.
And none of this even gets into why the sky is blue (look up Rayleigh scattering if you’re curious). Or why cobalt stannate is that particular kind of blue. Or for that matter where cælum and -uleus came from – there are speculations as to the Proto-Indo-European origins, but it’s not like we can ask the people who spoke those words. Not any more than I could ask the person who left the pencil on the table what they had drawn with it to wear the point down so much.
Well, perhaps they came back and picked it up and sharpened it and drew some more with it. Or perhaps someone else took it. I don’t know. I left it there when I departed. It had served its purpose for me.
Please send comments, replies, and suggestions for words to taste to me to ja...@harbeck.ca.
Feel free to pass this on to friends. If you've received it as a forward, feel free to join the Word Tasting Notes email list at http://groups.google.ca/group/word-tasting-notes .
Visit my blog at http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com .