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@BathNature Robin "red" breast

I always find it amusing how the boundaries of colours are cultural concepts and change over time. Robin redbreast, red fox, red hair... these aren't red, they're orange. But that colour used to be part of "red".

In Japan, blue and green are the same colour ("aoi").

Ancient Greek colours were really weird. In Homer, the sea, sheep, and wine were the same colour. Honey and leaves are the same colour. The sky and bronze are the same colour.

@BathNature I read an article once from a researcher who deliberately avoided teaching his daughter that the sky is blue when teaching her her colours. Then, once she knew her colours really well, he stopped to ask her what colour the sky was. She stopped and pondered it for a long time, before deciding that it was white.

And that's just as right of a response as any other. There's no reason the boundaries to colours have to be in any particular places.

(Sorry, offtopic - back to the birbs! )

@BathNature Same with pink. Named after the flower, pinks. Which are in turn come from a now-rare verb, "to pink", meaning "to decorate with a perforated pattern" (as in pinking shears)

BTW, orange was originally in French "une norenge" (cognate to Spanish "naranja"), but through a process called rebracketing, it became "une orenge" (lost the "n" as it blended together with "une").

Same story with "adder" (the venemous snake) - it was "a naddre", which became "an adder"