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Wearing breakfast to work
Remember the old box of Crayola crayons you had when you were a kid? I had one of those big boxes with 64 different colors and a built-in crayon sharpener. Most of the colors were pretty easy to understand. You had the basics, of course: red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, black. If you wanted a color that was a little darker than orange, you chose red orange. If you wanted something lighter than green, you chose yellow green. Most of the other colors were easy to understand, too. When coloring a picture of your house, you could use brick red. A picture of the ocean might use sea green. Of course, there were the burnt siennas and the thistles and the bittersweets. I don't remember what those colors were, and I'm not sure I understood them when I was a kid, either. The problem is that strange colors now predominate the Crayola box. Today, there's beaver, manatee, inchworm and flamingo. I'm not sure if I'm buying crayons or going to the zoo. There's also macaroni and cheese, purple mountain's majesty and razzmatazz. The bigger problem is that all of these new-fangled colors have made their way into the world of fashion, and that makes it difficult for a fashion-challenged fellow like me to buy clothes. I was online recently looking for some shirts. There were a few blues and whites. But mostly, there were colors I wasn't certain about. Sunflower, I figured, is yellow. Mauve is probably purple. But what is night? Dark blue or black? What's the difference between wine and burgundy, since burgundy is a type of wine? And just what is ochre? I don't mean to be sexist about this, but it had to be women who created these new color names. I don't know of a single man who would say, "Dahling, I'm going to drive down to the mall and purchase a cranberry shirt to wear with these charcoal trousers to the big game this weekend." No, sir. Men would say, "Honey, I'm fixin' to run to the Wal-mart and get me a red shirt to go with these black britches to wear to watch us whoop Tech's butt on Sattidy." I can only imagine the first conversation between the two designers who started this new trend. "Why, Gladys, that's a divine shirt you've created," one designer would say. "What color do you call it?" "Well, Myrtice, I was going to call it orange." "Oh, no, dear. You can't call it orange. That's just too… too… tacky. People in Tennessee wear orange and so do folks who have to pick up trash along the highway when they are performing their community service." "Well, what about pumpkin?" "That's better. But pumpkins are rather large. We don't want skinny people to think these shirts are just for fat people. What do you think of cantaloupe surprise?" "That's just perfect, Myrtice. Just perfect. Cantaloupe surprise it is." The real surprise is that you'll have to pay $74.90 for a designer shirt named for something you ate for breakfast. In fact, if my little shopping spree is any indication, you can wear your whole breakfast. With your cantaloupe surprise shirt, you can wear a pair of oatmeal slacks. If you need to dress it up a bit, just add a nice coffee sports coat. If you want to really go crazy, you can probably buy some banana socks. As a result of my recent online endeavor, I have a new rule. I'm never going to buy anything that's a color I have to look up in the dictionary. It happened this time. I was looking at dress shirts. The Web site said the shirts were available in blue, yellow, white, French blue and ecru. Ecru? What in the heck is that? So I looked it up. In two different dictionaries, ecru had a one-word definition: beige. Now I'm certainly not a linguistics expert, but I do make a living with words. And I believe with all my heart that if a word has a one-word definition, we should just eliminate that word from the language and use the definition. Just call the shirt beige. I beseech clothing designers to please stick with color names that we can all understand so that I don't further embarrass myself. I don't like to be embarrassed.
When I get embarrassed, my face turns all burnt raspberry.
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