a rose by any other name

For those of you who have just woken up (as opposed to the people who are still sleeping), late last night I posted a shot of a girl @ ASOS in a dress the colour of which I could not quite describe. The six or seven comments that came in in the next few hours were utterly delicious, and I thank you. The majority went with 'coral', with 'watermelon' running a close second.

On Sunday, when I saw the flash of this girl's pink top, I ran after her, only to realise: it's Betsan! My new friend! With her cute boyfriend Tom! And her top - by freak coincidence - Topshop, like her skirt from Saturday. I couldn't find hers exactly, but isn't this tunic amazing! They call it raspberry, but it is so not: it's really more coral, don't you think?



I love the effortless chic that they both display (besides being really cool as human beings). Tom's plaid on plaid action, for example. I love seeing people on the weekend in two consecutive days: you can almost see their overnight bag, the way, for example, Betsan wore the same green necklace both days, same bag..



Ironically, her particular colour isn't even coral! If you look at the left, in a colour exercise, I increased the yellow: that's more light coral, to me. (Yesterday's dress is probably deeper coral). I think you'd simply call this top PINK.



It's such a simple word: pink. My favourite Aunt Paula sent me a shot of my niece, Aili, in Seattle, drinking pink lemonade and dressed top to toe in pink, including her shades. We all - universally - seem to go thru a distinct pink phase as little girls, and then, tho we seem to grow out of it, we never do entirely. So, curious, I started using my favourite new toy, google translate, to explore the word in other tongues.

I discovered that it's قرنفل in Arabic. In the land of my grandmother's roots, Belarus, it's: ружовы

In Chinese, the 'simplified' version has four nouns (the first is 粉红色), two verbs, and three adjectives (God knows how many the traditional version has). Croatian is karanfil for the noun, but the adjective is actually ROZE. Catalan is ROSA, Basque ARROSA, Czech růžový, Danish lyserød, Dutch, OMG, has TWELVE nouns, ELEVEN verbs (what exactly is the English verb for pink? Does one pink? Have any of you been pinked?), and five adjectives, starting with ROZE, ROSE, ROZIG, ROOSKLEURIG, and - I love this - the fifth is CHIC.

The Estonians have ROOSA, but also KAHVATUPUNANE (that's easy for you to say!), the Filipinos have four adjectives, including ROSA, but also nasa mabuting kalagayan. So far the first variation of 'pink' I've found is from the Finns, God bless them, who have PINKKI, but also VAALEANPUNAINEN, and PUNAINEN TAKKI. Which brings us to the French, who of course have ROSE, but also INCARNAT and GAUCHISSANT.

I could go on (I'm only at the F's), but I really must go. So I leave you with one word: ροζ , which, while being pink, is still Greek to me.