Teal (pronounced teel)
(1) Any
of several species of small dabbling, short-necked freshwater ducks (such as
the Eurasian Anas crecca (common teal)), of worldwide distribution and related
to the mallard, travelling usually in tight flocks and frequenting ponds, lakes
and marshes.
(2) A
color, a medium to dark greenish blue, often mixed with traces of azure, beryl,
cerulean, cobalt, indigo, navy, royal, sapphire, turquoise & ultramarine, also
called teal blue and (rarely) tealturquoise, peacockblue or blueteal.
(3) As
TEAl, the abbreviation of triethylaluminium (in organic chemistry, a volatile
organometallic compound (Al2(C2H5)6
or Al2Et6) used in various chemical processes and as an
ignitor in rockets and jet engines.)
(4) As
TEAL, the (historical) initialism of Tasman Empire Airways Limited, the
forerunner to Air New Zealand.
(5) A
collective descriptor informally adopted to refer to certain nominally
independent candidates contesting certain electorates in the 2022 Australian
general election.
1275-1375:
From Middle English tele (small
freshwater duck), probably from the (unrecorded) Old English tǣle and cognate with the Middle
Low German tēlink, from the from West
Germanic taili, from the West
Frisian tjilling (teal) and the Middle
Dutch tēling (teal
(source of the Modern Dutch taling)). The Middle Low German tēlink, was from the Proto-Germanic tailijaz, of unknown ultimate origin, with no
cognates outside of Germanic. As the
name of a shade of dark greenish-blue resembling the color patterns on the
fowl's head and wings, it is attested from 1923 in clothing advertisements,
thereby joining the long list of variations of descriptions of the variations
in the shades of blue including: blue; Alice blue, aqua, aquamarine, azure,
baby blue, beryl, bice, bice blue, blue green, blue violet, blueberry, cadet
blue, Cambridge blue, cerulean, cobalt blue, Copenhagen blue, cornflower,
cornflower blue, cyan, dark blue, Dodger blue, duck-egg blue, eggshell blue,
electric-blue, gentian blue, ice blue, lapis lazuli, light blue, lovat,
mazarine, midnight blue, navy, Nile blue, Oxford blue, peacock blue, petrol
blue, powder blue, Prussian blue, robin's-egg blue, royal blue, sapphire, saxe
blue, slate blue, sky blue, teal, turquoise, ultramarine, Wedgwood blue & zaffre. Teal is a noun & adjective and tealish is an adjective; the noun plural is teal or (especially
collectively), teals. The spelling teale is obsolete.
Teal sample by Canva.
Teal’s hexadecimal
code is #008080 with RGB values of R: 0, G: 50.2, B: 50.2 and CMYK values of C:
1, M: 0, Y: 0, K:0.5, a hue angle of 180o, a saturation of 100% and
a lightness of 25.1%. According to the authoritative
Canva, for Tibetan monks it was symbolic of the infinity of the sea and sky and
for Egyptians, the color of truth and faith.
Discussing the color, Adobe’s editors were almost lyrical, suggesting readers
“picture the warm ocean waves in Baja California, made of that color that isn’t
quite blue and isn’t quite green. The
water brings in the cool side of summer.”
That’s evocative but the website goes on to note before it was a color
it was the name of a bird, “teal” adopted for the blueish-green (or
greenish-blue) only in 1917, the reference being to the area around the eye of
the Eurasian teal duck.
Carmignano Visitation (circa 1529), oil on panel by
Pontormo (Jacopo Carucci; 1494–1557), propositura dei Santi Michele e
Francesco, Carmignano, Italy.
The artist’s
use of a startling tealish blue for the robe is thought a deliberate choice to emphasize Mary's exalted place in Christian theology. In Christianity, the Visitation of the
Blessed Virgin Mary (clipped usually in general use to “the Visitation”), refers
to the visit of Mary, the pregnant with Jesus, to Elizabeth, pregnant with John
the Baptist, the story told in the Gospel of Luke (1:39–56). Traditionally, the Christian feast day commemorating this
visit appeared in ecclesiastical calendars on 2 July (Western)
or 30 March (orthodox) but in some churches in the West it’s now celebrated on 31
May.
1996 Lancia Y LX-in Grigio Steel over teal Alcantara.
Historically, blue pigment
was both expensive and rare; while in the natural environment sources of green were,
it was difficult for chemists to create dyes and pigments in blue which did not
rapidly (and often inconsistently) fade.
In commerce, because both blue and green pigment were needed to make
teal, the blend came to be considered a color of elevated status (and thus
price). The special place of blue (in its
time Prussian blue was revolutionary) was reprised in the electronic age when
the blue LED (light emitting diode) proved an elusive target. Although a blue LED had been created as early
as 1972 (US Patent US3819974 A granted in 1974), the glow was faint because the
materials used in the 1960s & 1970s for red & green LEDs (gallium
arsenide (GaAs) or gallium phosphide (GaP) lacked the necessary width in bandgap
(in physics the energy difference between two allowed ranges of electron energy
in a solid). Not until the early 1990s
did researchers find the method of growing high-quality Gallium Nitride (GaN) at
scale on sapphire substrates did the blue LED become technically and
commercially viable and with it came the white LED (made possible by combining
blue light with yellow phosphor). That
gained the researchers the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics and the white LED has revolutionized
illumination (for birth screens and lighting) and achieved massive energy
savings worldwide.
TEAL Lockheed
L-188 Electra ZK-TEB 1963 (left) & 1965 (right). The TEAL livery was retained when the
corporate name was changed in 1965, the aircraft not immediately re-painted,
“Air New Zealand” replacing “TEAL JET PROP” on the fuselage as required by the rules of the Convention
on International Civil Aviation (1944).
The airline TEAL (Tasman Empire Airways
Limited) emerged from the Tasman Sea Agreement, an intergovernmental treaty between
the Australia, New Zealand and the UK, concluded in London early in 1940. The purpose of the operation was to provide
for the trans-Tasman traffic of passengers, cargo and mail, something which had
been disrupted by the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. In the manner of a number of wartime
agreements, the treaty contained a sunset clause which stipulated a termination
within three months of the end of the war with Germany but such was the state
of post-war civil aviation that arrangements were carried over and pre-war
practices did not return to the trans-Tasman route until 1954. As part of that re-organization, the
shareholdings, which previously had been spread between the New Zealand
Government (20%), Union Airways (19%), BOAC (38%) and Qantas (23%), were
dissolved and the two governments assumed co-ownership until 1961 when both
decided to maintain separate national carriers, TEAL and Qantas, the relationship having been strained since the Australians had insisted TEAL order the turboprop Lockheed Electra to maintain fleet standardization with Qantas while the New Zealanders wanted to upgrade to jets. In 1965, TEAL was re-named Air New Zealand.
Lindsay
Lohan in teal, Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards (2004, left), publicity shot in Greece
(2019, centre) & premiere of Mean
Girls (2004).
Trooping the color: The teal mafia out campaigning in the Wentworth electorate, Australian general election 2022.
The so-called “teal independents” are
a number of nominally independent candidates contesting certain electorates in
the 2022 Australian general election.
The teal candidates on which there has been much focus are almost all
professional women drawn from outside professional politics, contesting
nominally “safe” Liberal Party seats in which there’s a higher than average interest in progressive issues, especially climate change. The use of the color teal is thought an
allusion to the mixing of blue and green, blue a reference either to the “blue-blood”
demographic profile of the electorates or it being the traditional color
associated with conservative politics and green the environmental consciousness
which the teals are making a focus of their campaigns. Former Liberal Party prime-minister John
Howard (b 1939; prime-minister 1996-2007) was not impressed by the practice of
styling the teals as “independents”, claiming it was misleading given the
source of some of their funding and logistical support from entities which
would in the US be understood as PACs (political action committees), entities
which combined lobbying with activism on specific issues. Mr Howard suggested the teals were merely “…posing as independents” and were really “…anti-Liberal groupies”, their aim being
“…to hurt the Liberal party, not to
represent the middle ground of their electorates” adding “They don’t represent disgruntled Liberals. They represent a group in the community that
wants to destroy the Liberal government. It’s as simple as that.”
Flags
of the
Liberal Party of Australian and Australian Labor Party (ALP).
Mr Howard was right in that the consequences really are simple as that: if a sufficient
number of teals are successful, they will hurt the Liberal party and destroy
the Liberal-National coalition government but where the teals would differ
from the former prime-minister is in not conflating cause with effect. The teal candidates have well expressed (if
not especially detailed) policy objectives and are seeking to destroy the
government because they wish to see alternative policies pursued and about
that, voters will agree, disagree or remain indifferent. What attracted most attention however was Mr
Howard’s choice of the word “groupies” to refer to the (mostly female) teals,
one critic noting an analysis of the composition of the four ministries he
formed while prime-minister did suggest he was inclined to appoint women to the
“touchy-feely” portfolios dealing with people while the men got the meatier appointments.
On the books of the central Arizona town of Sedona is an ordinance banning brightly colored signs or buildings, an admirable law intended to limit the jarring intrusions of commerce on the visual environment. In Sedona, the "golden arches" of McDonalds are teal-blue.
That aside, he does have a point about the
word “independent” being misleading.
Historically, in Australia, it’s been understood as meaning a candidate
for or member of a parliament who is not a member of a political party (within
the legally-defined meaning). That the
teals are not but, though not a conventional party, the teal thing is clearly a
concept, a movement or something else beyond a mere state of mind and parts of
it are a framework providing the candidates with financial and administrative
assistance in a more structured way that that of local volunteers. The teals (not all of whom use the color in
their advertising, one in particular running a “pink” campaign) have also been
the victims of some ambush marketing, complaining that others were now muddying
the waters by sending out teal-colored flyers.
They might have some difficulty in enforcing an exclusivity of right on
a color, about the only restriction enforced is on purple which can’t be used
in circumstances where it might be confused with something from the Australian
Electoral commission which most jealously guards its purple. Nor is some fluidity of meaning unknown in
Australian politics. During the 1970s
and 1980s, in the Victorian Labor Party, although an apparent contradiction in
terms, a faction was formed called the “Independents”, a faction self-described
by its members as being a faction for those “who disliked factional politics”. It was novel then and unthinkable now but
happened at a time when the Left had been neutralized by federal intervention and
the Right was still obsessed with the DLP (the Democratic Labor Party, the even more right-wing Roman-Catholic
breakaway which was until the emergence of One Nation the worst form of political excrement to enjoy significant electoral success) and the Cold War. There was a
gap in the market.
Flags
of the Australian National Party & the Australian Greens.
Teal as blend of
blue and green imparting political meaning works in Australia because the use
of the colors red (of the left), blue (of the right) & green (of the
greenies) is well understood. Even the
historic association of the National Party with green doesn’t cause
confusion. The National Party (originally
the Country Party and briefly in some places the National-Country Party), had
always used green to reflect their agrarian origins but adapted well in the
1980s to the emergence of formalized Green parties (which of course chose green
for semiotic purposes). Pragmatists, the Nationals, operating as usual like horse-traders, settled on a slightly darker
shade with gold lettering, the traditional Australian sporting livery. Briefly, the Nationals had flirted with
shades of brown, the idea being to convey “the people of the soil” but the idea
was quickly abandoned, not because brown was so associated with the Nazis (the Braunes Haus (Brown House)) was their early
Munich headquarters and the Surmabteilung
(the SA and literally "Storm Detachment" but usually called storm-troopers) were street thugs known as the “brownshirts” because of their uniform) but because brown is
such an unappealing colour and difficult for graphic artists to handle.
Crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013) liked teal
pantsuits and retained a fondness for the shade,
even as the cut of her clothes became more accommodating.
The origin of red being
associated with the politics of radicalism and revolution is generally assumed
to date from the use in the French revolution where the idea was to represent
the blood spilled in the overthrow of the ancien
régime although the shade used should perhaps have been darkened a little
in the years that followed as the revolution began “to consume its children”. Around the planet, colors are widely used as
political identifiers and, with different traditions of use and history of
origin, there’s a wide divergence of meaning; what a color in one country
conveys can mean the opposite in another.
There’s also the point that at one, important level, a color is just a
color and the choice, even for political purposes, may be purely on aesthetic
grounds: Hitler made no secret that he
choose red, white and black as for the early depictions of the swastika and
other Nazi imagery because his ideological opponents, the communists, had used
it with such success. Among the best
known color adoptions are orange and green in Ireland, yellow and red in
Thailand and black by the so-called Islamic State (داعش, Dāʿish) and a number of Islamist and Islamic
fundamentalist movements (as a symbol of jihad), saffron in India because of
the traditional association with Hinduism and the Hindu nationalist movement. The association of certain blue & red with
political parties or ideologies is fairly consistent in the English-speaking
world except for the curious pattern of use in the United States.
Flags
of the US Republican Party (Elephants) & US Democrat Party (Donkeys).
In
the US, although the idea of blue states (Democrats) and red states
(Republicans) is now entrenched as part of the political lexicon, it's been
that way only for two decades odd. Red
and blue had long been used to illustrate the US electoral map but there was
never any consistency in how they were allotted to the parties and in some elections,
different television networks might use them differently or even use different
colors entirely, one of the considerations being what worked best on the then
novel medium of color television. The
other influence was possibly political culture, there being in the US little
tradition of a mainstream, radical party of the left so the red-blue contrast
as it was understood elsewhere in the English-speaking world didn't register in
the same way. It was in the 2000
presidential election that the television networks agreed to standardize the red
and blue designations for Republicans and Democrats, the incentive simply one
of convenience in the reporting of the drawn-out Electoral College numbers that
year. As the red and blue imagery flowed
across screens for weeks before the numbers were settled, the color
associations became set in stone.
Shades
of purple, the US 2004 presidential election: outcomes from Electoral College
represented by state (left) and county (right).
The
idea of the US as a divided society of red states (emblematically the fly-overs) and
blue states (with populations on the corrupting coastlines) is graphically
illustrated when the states are colored according to the winner-takes-all
system electoral college system but if the red-blue map is instead constructed county
by county, a more nuanced spectrum emerges as one that is in shades of purple
(purple a mix of red & blue as teal is of green & blue). The US is a country of divisions and many of
the cleavages are cross-cutting but the state by state maps do exaggerate the
extent of the political polarization.
2021 McLaren
GT Coupé in teal (Serpentine in the McLaren color chart).
