Purple (pronounced pur-puhl)
(1) Any color having components of both red and blue (often
highly saturated), the darker the hue, the more likely to be described thus.
(2) In color theory, any non-spectral color on the line
of purples on a color chromaticity diagram or a color wheel between violet and
red.
(3) A dye or pigment producing such a colour
(4) Cloth or clothing of this hue, especially as formerly
worn distinctively by persons of imperial, royal, or other high rank.
(5) In the Roman Catholic Church, a term at various times
used to describe a monsignor, bishop or cardinal (or their office), now most
associated with the rank, office or authority of a cardinal.
(6) Imperial, regal, or princely in rank or position.
(7) Any of several nymphalid butterflies including the red-spotted
purple and the banded purple)
(8) Of or pertaining to the color purple (or certain things
regarded as purple).
(9) In writing, showy or overwrought; exaggerated use of literary
devices and effects; marked by excessively ornate rhetoric (purpureal).
(10) In language, profane or shocking; swearing.
(11) In modern politics, relating to or noting political
or ideological diversity (in the US based on the blending of Democrat (blue)
and Republican (red); in other places red & blue indicate different places
on the political spectrum).
(12) In drug slang; the purple haze cultivar of cannabis
in the kush family, either pure or mixed with others, or by extension any
variety of smoked marijuana (“purple haze” a popular name for commercially available
weed in those places where such thing are lawful. Purple haze was originally slang for LSD.
(13) In agriculture, earcockle, a disease of wheat.
(14) To make or become purple (or, in ecclesiastical use,
to put on one’s purple vestments) .
Pre 1000: From the Middle English noun and adjective purple, purpel & purpur, from Old English purpuren & purpul, a dissimilation (first recorded in Northumbrian, in the
Lindisfarne gospel) of purpure (purple
dye, a purple garment), from the adjective purpuren
(purple; dyed or colored purple), from purpura
(a kind of shellfish, Any of various species of molluscs from which Tyrian
purple dye was obtained, especially the common dog whelk; the dye; cloth so
dyed; splendid attire generally), from the Ancient Greek πορφύρα (porphýra or porphura) (the purple fish (Murex)), perhaps of Semitic origin. Purpur
continued as a parallel form until the fifteenth century and was maintained in
the rules of heraldry until well into the nineteenth. The verb purple (to tinge or stain with
purple) was from the noun and emerged circa 1400. The earlier form was purpured, a past-participle adjective. The adjective purplish (somewhat purple,
tending to purple) was from the noun and dates from the 1560s. Purple is a noun, verb & adjective, purpled
& purpling are verbs, purplish, purpler, purply & purplest are
adjectives and purpleness is a noun; the noun plural is purples.
1974 Triumph Stag in magenta. Some of the shades of brown, beige, orange and such used in the 1970s by British Leyland are not highly regarded but some were quite striking. The rhetorical use in reference to “the splendid; the gaudy”
began as a description of garments (classically imperial regalia) and since the
mid-eighteenth century, as “purple prose” of writing. In US political discourse and commentary,
purple has since been used (often in graphical or cartographic form) to indicating
the sectional or geographical spaces in which the increasing division of the
country into red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) was less apparent. That this came into widespread use only by
around 2004 is because the use of red & blue by the US news media became
(more or less) standardized only by the 1990s, use have begun circa 1980,
something without any relationship to the linking of the colors (red=left; blue=right)
traditional in other parts of the English-speaking world. Other words used to describe purplish shades include lavender,
mauve, amethyst, violet (with many sub-types) lilac, orchid, indigo, mulberry,
plum, eggplant (aubergine seems rare but is used in commerce), fuchsia, heliotrope, periwinkle,
purpureus & thistle and while many directly reference the flowers of plants, one curiosity is magenta: It was so called because the dye of that shade was created at the
time of the Battle of Magenta (1559) in which French and Sardinian forces defeated those of the Austrians. Purple is widely
used in zoology and botany to create common names of species to some extent
colored purple.
Purple patch: 1970 Dodge Challenger (440 Six-Pack) in Plum Crazy (left) and 1971 Plymouth Hemi
‘Cuda in In Violet) (clone; right).
Chrysler had some history in the coining of
fanciful names for colors dating from the psychedelic era of the late 1960s
when the choices included Plum Crazy,
In-Violet, Tor Red, Sub Lime, Sassy Grass, Panther Pink, Moulin Rouge, Top
Banana, Lemon Twist & Citron Yella.
Although it may be an industry myth, the story told was that Plum Crazy & In-Violet (lurid shades of purple) were late additions because the
killjoy board refused to sign-off on Statutory
Grape. The lurid colors soon disappeared, not only because fashions change but because at the time they depended on the use of lead which was banned from paint in the early 1970s. Not until the early twenty-first century did manufacturers perfect ways economically to replicate the earlier colors without using lead.
Salma Hayek in eye-catching purple, Cannes Film Festival May 2015.In idiomatic use, purple is popular. One “born into the purple” was literally one
of royal or exalted birth although it’s now often used even of those from
families somewhere in the upper middle class.
The “purple death” was hospital slang for Spanish influenza and it was
an allusion to the cyanosis which, because of the difficulty breathing, which
would turn the skin purple. In the early
post-war years “purple death” was also used to describe a cheap Italian wine. The
phrase “once in a purple moon” was a variation of “once in a blue moon” and
some dictionaries include an entry, apparently only for the purpose of assuring
us that not only is it extinct but it may never have been in common use. “Purple bacteria” (the form only ever used in
the plural) are a proteobacteria which produce their own food using
photosynthesis; they are all classed as purple, even though some are orange,
red or brown. In the analogue-era world
of the phone phreaks (hackers who used the telephone networks for other than
the intended purpose), a “purple box” was a device which added a hold facility
to a telephone line. It was an allusion
to the general term “black box” used in engineering and electronics to describe
small devices with specific purposes; not all “purple boxes” were actually
purple. “Purple gas” was a Canadian term
which described the gas (motor spirit; petrol) colored with a purple dye to
indicate it was sold subject to a lower rate of taxation and for use only in
agriculture and not on public roads. Anyone
found using “purple gas” beyond a farm could be charged and many countries use
similar methods though the dye is not always purple. “Purple gold” was a synonym of amethyst gold
(a brittle alloy of gold and aluminium, purple in colour).
1994 Porsche 911 Turbo 3.6 (964) in Amethyst Metallic over Classic Gray.
A “purple passage” (also as “purple prose”) was
any form of writing thought showy or overwrought, using an exaggerated array of
literary devices and effects or marked by excessively ornate rhetoric. It was a criticism but the later “purple
patch” which describes any particular good period or performance (in any
context) was wholly positive. The “purple
pill” was an advertising slogan used by a pharmaceutical company but unlike “little
blue pill” (Viagra), it never entered the vernacular. “Purple plague” has specific meanings in
chemistry and electronics (relating to a chemical reaction which produces an undesirable
purple compound) but a more amusing use is by Roman Catholic bishops noting a
unwanted number of monsignors (who wear a purple sash) in their dioceses, sent
there by the Vatican. In US politics a “purple
state” is a “swing state”, one which, depending on this and that, may vote
either Republican (red) or Democrat (blue).
The “purple star” was the symbol worn by Jehovah's Witnesses in concentration
camps in Nazi Germany (1933-1945), one of a number of color-coded patches, the
best-known of which was the yellow Jewish star.
The Jehovah's Witnesses were an interesting case in that uniquely among
the camp inmates, they could at any time leave if they were prepared to sign a
declaration denying their religious beliefs.
In international air-traffic management, a “purple zone” (also “purple
airway”) describes a route reserved for an aircraft on which a member of a
royal family is flying. In US military
use, the “Purple Heart” dating from 1932, is still awarded to service personnel
wounded in combat. It’s origin was a
decoration in purple cloth first awarded in 1782 which came to be known as the “wound
stripe”. In the mid 1960s, “purple haze”
was slang for LSD (Lysergic
acid diethylamide, a psychedelic drug with a long history verging on academic respectability before becoming a popular
hallucinogenic, users clipping the term to "acid"); it was later repurposed for various strains of weed.
Lindsay Lohan, admirer of all things purple.
The dye tyrian purple (all the evidence suggests it would
now be thought a crimson), was produced around Tyre and was prized as dye for
royal garments, hence the figurative use in the sixteenth century of purple for
“imperial or regal power” (it was also the color of mourning or penitence among
royalty or the upper reaches of the clergy).
Tyrian purple (also known as shellfish purple) was for long periods the
most expensive substance in Antiquity (often (by weight) three times the value
of gold, the exchange rate set by a Roman edict issued in 301 AD. By the fifteenth century when the intricate
process to extract and process the dye was lost, Tyrian purple had for millennia
been variously a symbol of strength, sovereignty and money and its use had
spread from the Classical world to Southern Europe, North Africa, and Western
Asia and was so associated with the civilization of the Phoenicians (the color
named after their city-state Tyre) that they were known as the “purple people”. What many didn’t know was that the dye
associated with the illustrious came not from a gemstone or some vivid coral
but from the slimy mucous of sea snails in the Murex family. Debate continues about what must have been
the process used in extraction and production although, given many factories
and artisans were involved over the years, there may have been many variations
of the method.
It was in 1453 when the Byzantine capital Constantinople (modern-day
Istanbul) fell to the Ottomans that the knowledge of Tyrian purple was lost,
something of a footnote to the end of the Eastern Roman Empire but still a
loss. Then, the infamously smelly
dyeworks of the old city were the hub of purple production although, after a
series of punitive taxes, the Catholic Church had lost control of the pigment
which is the origin of the pope’s decision that red would become the new symbol
of Christian power and this was adopted for the garb of cardinals; the story that
the vivid red symbolized the blood cardinals mush be prepared to spill in the
defense of their pope was just a cover story although one obviously approved of
by the pontiff.
Beginning in 1968 with Shades of Deep Purple (left), the rock band Deep Purple sometimes
used purple-themed album cover art and may have wished they'd stuck with that for their eponymous third album (1969). The original cover (centre), featuring a
fragment of one panel of the triptych The
Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Hieronymus Bosch (circa
1450-1516), was declared "demonic" by the US distributors so an alternative needed hastily be arranged and whether because of the tight schedule or just wanting to play it safe, they stuck to purple (right). They'd earlier had a similar difficulty with their US label when releasing their second album (The Book of Taliesyn (1968)), the objection that time that one song title (Wring That Neck) was "too violent" (it was an instrumental piece and the reference was to a technique used with the neck of a guitar but it was anyway changed to Hard Road). Times have changed.
In literary theory, “to etiolate” a text is to remove or revise the “purple passages”. In literature, purple passages are those sections of a text which are overly elaborate, flowery, or extravagant in style, often prioritizing ornate or decorative language and the use of needlessly long words, the meaning of which is often obscure. Such writing is thought a literary self-indulgence or a mere pretentious display of knowledge; grandiose execution at the expense of clarity, the usual critique being “style over substance”. The phrase is almost certainly derived from the historic use of the once rare and expensive purple dye being restricted (actually by statute or edict in some places) to royalty and even when availability became wider, the association with luxury & wealth continued. The idea has long been a tool of critics, Roman lyric poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65-8 BC) in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry, 19 BC) referring disapprovingly to the purpureus… pannus (a purple piece of cloth), the irrelevant insertion of a grandiloquent or melodramatic passage into a work. Horace thought this disruptive at best and absurd at worst and “purple passages” continues to be used to describe writing which is needlessly ornate, florid and usually discordantly incongruous. Used almost always pejoratively (although there do seem to be some admirers), comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) might have called such flourishes “formalism”.
