Re: Varon

Sgrìobh Nik Taylor:

>Padraic Brown wrote:
>>  When transitive, to 'make blue'; when intrans., to 'become blue'.
>>  I even looked in the dictionary to make sure I wasn't just
>>  belying an ideosyncrasy of my idiolect!
>
>Could you give an example?  I don't think I've ever heard "to blue".
     Ask any gunsmith.  It's a form of corrosion resistance, used for
centuries, as far as I know.  Many firearms come optionally stainless
steel or blued.  "Before you put the parts together, you must blue
the metal."

     Let's see if we can come up with a few which others haven't already:

     "His face purpled.  I thought that he was going to have a fit."

     English is not consistent in this, though, as others have pointed
out.  You would say "redden" to mean "impart the color red".
Likewise "blacken" for "black".  Certainly no native English speaker
would say, "to chartreuse", or, to choose an English color, "to
orange".

     I, too, and dubious about "to green" as a transitive.  I suppose
that you could stretch it a bit and use it intransitively:  "The
forests green in the Spring."  But it would be a rather poetic
phrasing, certainly unusual.

-Speireag.
--
I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree
which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the
valley of the Euphrates.  -- Theodore Roosevelt