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The Stop
A ‘confident’ colour, orange - as a word - didn’t exist in the English language until the early 16th century. Previously the colour was described as ‘yellow-red’ or - to quote Chaucer’s description of the rooster Chauntecleer, protagonist of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale - giolureade, somewhere ‘betwixe yelw & reed’. With the arrival of the fruit, however, orange - a corruption of the Sanskrit word naraga - finally had a name.1
The fruit was probably first grown in China, and over centuries spread West. Called nārang in Persian, nāranj in Arabic, naranja in Spanish and orenge in French, the word first became a name for the colour in the 16th century. Though orange had been a colour artists used to add an ‘air of mystery tinged with menace’ - a sentiment largely based on its connection to the ‘sparkling arsenic sulphide mineral’ from which orpiment, an early source which provided the colour was derived - it wasn’t until the Dutch House of Orange made it a heraldic colour that orange became a major player in the colour world.
The abstract artist Wassily Kadinsky described orange as ‘a man, convinced of his own powers’. Used today to signify danger - whether through prisoners’ jumpsuits, traffic signs, or airplanes’ black boxes - orange has also become the brand colour of companies as diverse as Hermes, Easyjet and Hooters. Which, I guess, says it all.
The Detour
Today’s Detour is to Donks, a short (6:36) film in which ocean plastics and bottom feeders dance around and create playful and psychedelic scenes. It’s an amazing film, and certainly worth the time.
The Recommendation
Today’s Recommendation is A Clockwork Orange (1972). Directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Malcolm McDowell, the film is a disturbing commentary on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs and various social, political, and economic subjects all set in a dystopian near-future Britain.2 It’s also a very, very good film.
A Clockwork Orange (1972) Trailer
The Sounds
Today’s Sounds is a selection of orange-related songs that have been languishing in my ‘To-Use’ playlist.3 They’re all good - but the Erykah Badu track is definitely worth a listen: ‘Apples and Oranges’ (Pink Floyd, 1967), ‘Kurious Oranj’ (The Fall, 1988), ‘Orange Moon’ (Erykah Badu, 2000), ‘Orange Colored Sky’ (Nat King Cole, 1950) and ‘Orange Blood’ (Mt. Joy, 2022). Enjoy!
The Thought
Today’s Thought is an twist - by Kassia St Clair - on Kadinsky’s description of orange:
‘Orange is like a man, desperately seeking to convince others of his powers.’
If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:
And that’s the end of this Stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion!
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Until the next Stop …
Sources for today’s Stop include St Clair, Kassia. The Secret Lives of Colour. London: Hatchette, 2016 and Grovier, Kelly. The Art of Colour. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
For more information, see The Bus 4.37: A Clockwork Orange.
I’m shocked I have a To-Use playlist long enough to have at least this many orange-themed songs. Nevertheless, the Fall song is brilliant, no one can top NKC and the Badu song is excellent. These three alone are worth the price of admission!d
https://open.spotify.com/album/5d0tz2baP5WGhMzZvONcgU?si=cG17HgzzRbiLb-kO25VYtg
Orange only became what anthropologists call a 'basic colour' term - cultures can be classified by their presence/absence; the simplest cultures known only have three such terms; black, red, and green - in Western society in the 1970s. Even in the early sixties, Parker Brother's card game 'Rook' denoted its orange suit as 'Yellow'. Just so, the logistics company Yellow, recently defunct, had in fact bright orange tractors. Started in 1906 as Yellow Cabs, even as late as 1968 the term Yellow was kept though for decades the trucks had been what we now know as orange. Part of the story behind basic colour terms in modern society was the advent of industrial dyes in the late 19th century, reintroducing purples, pinks, greys and of course, orange, into the common vocabulary.