color

n. The spectral composition of visible light.

n. A particular set of visible spectral compositions, perceived or named as a class[.]

The modern English Color is now the same as the Latin from which it came, though the intervening steps are not: the Latin led to the Old French color, which led to the Anglo-Norman colur, which visited Middle English as colour. The Old Latin root is colos, which referred not to color in general but any sort of covering, which contributed to the earliest sense of the world, which referred to the color of the skin or complexion in particular. The Old Latin comes from the PIE *kel-, meaning to cover or conceal. Our modern definition is from the 14th century, from Middle English, at which point it had replaced the word previously employed, blee.

Blee was a perfectly lovely word, from the Old English blēo, and I’m sorry it left the language. It came from the Proto-Germanic *blījan (“light” or “happy”), itself from PIE *bhlē̆i-, which also meant “light” in color or complexion. Along an evolutionary fork, it gave us the Old English blīþe, from whence “blithe” (as in “blithely”), which meant a light of mood (“glad”) rather than of color.

Of course, as anyone who’s ever looked at a box of crayons can attest, there is a wide variety of color words in use, despite the relatively circumscribed nature of our word for the phenomenon in general.

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ketchup

A tomato-vinegar based sauce.

Ketchup seems as American as apple pie (which itself is English, not American), but just like the pizza we know and love originated in Greece, so the tomato ketchup we use today has a history very different from Heinz 57.

The origins of the word come from a Chinese dialect: 鮭汁, or kê-chiap (“brine of fish”), which was taken into Malay as kicap (pronounced “kichap” but also spelled as kecap and ketjap). Our early Anglicization was catchup (c. 1690), which transmuted into catsup (first used by Jonathan Swift, by all appearances, in 1730), which is the still-used alternative to “ketchup”. Our modern firm first appeared in 1711 in An Account of the Trade in India by Charles Locklear.

Though the lineage here seems straightforward enough, some have advanced the notion that our ketchup is a cognate of the French escavèche (“food in sauce”) but also more importantly the Spanish/Portuguese escabeche, which refers both to a style of food and the brine-like sauce used to marinate it. The word has been traced back to al-sikbaj, of which Karen Hess’ proposed iskebey may be a poor transliteration. Regardless, the etymology refers to a pickled dish: in the former’s case, it comes from the Persian sik (“vinegar”) and ba (“food”).

If you look carefully at a bottle of ketchup, it will likely refer to itself as “tomato ketchup”; this may seem redundant until you realize that a tomato-based version was a fairly recent change in the evolution of the condiment (specifically, the very early 19th century). Though the original may have been fish, its earliest forms were mushroom, walnut, and other things that don’t sound nearly as appetizing (in fact, as late as the early 18th century, tomatoes were considered poisonous).

It has also been suggested that the early origins of ketchup—that is, as kê-chiap—eventually led to the modern condiment known as soy sauce, more popular in inland regions of China. In countries whose cuisine more prominently features seafood, fish sauce is still alive and well: in Vietnam, it is known as nước mắm; in Korea it is aek jeot; &tc. How much it resembles the earliest forms of ketchup, however, is anyone’s guess.