Knitting Kninja

Let’s talk about yellow.  The most noticable color on the spectrum, it’s been largely mistreated for years, misused, and under appreciated.  Until recently, when I thought of yellow clothing, I thought of that hideous pastel yellow that comes out in spring, often paired with pastel pinks or blues, or a set of primaries, often used in stripes.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with these yellows, but I’ve never found them appealing.  Yellow is a color that I can wear, but usually don’t.

But lately, I’ve been drawn to yellow.  It seems like yellow’s finally getting its due – it’s been used lately by designers in such interesting and attractive ways that I can’t help seeing its virtues.

I was trying to figure out why yellow’s been so mistreated for so long.  It is a difficult color for many people to wear.  A little goes such a long way.  But that can’t be the only reason.  A trip to the dictionary indicated that our discomfort with yellow goes back a long way.  Yellow is cowardly, yellow is morbidly sensationalist, yellow is envious, yellow is sallow, yellow is an offensive racial slur.  Yellow is the color of jaundice, poisonous beasties, gall, quaratine, disease, stinging insects, old age.

But yellow is also the color of filling foods, first light, hair browded in a tress, precious metals, fluttering songbirds, chattering monkeys, taxi cabs, Spring.  It’s not a color that is willing to be passive.  Yellow is loud and boistrous, even in its more muted shades.  There’s something a little bit uncomfortable about a color that is so indecently itself at all times, but there’s also something enticing about yellow.

When I was a small child, yellow was the only color I couldn’t pronounce.  I called it reh-roh, which probably made me sound like Scooby Doo.

The word yellow comes from a line of words leading back to the Indo-European gelwa, which meant to shine or glisten.  Yellow was not much distinguished from green in its early etymological stages.  It’s funny to think that so much of how we see color derives from how we say color.  The distinctions we make between, say, blue and purple, are fairly arbitrary, and need not have existed.  The etymological course of gelwa shows that it developed into words meaning white or green in some languages.

I’ve been craving something yellow lately, but I’m not sure what.  It’s not actually a color that I have a lot of.  I’m going to think on this a bit more, but I think there’s a lot of yellow in my future.