Because the dry outer skin is a rich red colour
Wait till they find out that some cultures didn’t have separate words for green and blue
An orange is about the only thing correctly named
Because purple isn’t a colour
It’s the absence of colour your brain cannot interpret so it makes a purple.
I doubt whoever named it knew that though
We’re not white on the Inside, so why should a red onion have to be red all the way through
in hungarian it’s purple onion, you just choose the wrong language :)
At least we aren’t hungary all the time
Jess and Rob on Words Unraveled talk about color word origins, and their discussion is illuminating about the cultural variance in perception of color. Now I am at peace with all the seemingly weird color names for things.
For a quicker tour, Vox talks about the order that languages fill in color words as cultures begin to refine their distinction.
Because they are only purple on the inside. Do you think apples are white? Or bananas?
Humans are red so why not?
That’s a different variety than my local grocers. Stores near me, the papery outside it brown the red flesh you see there is dark purple for us.
Yet purple finches clearly are red
Same reason they call the tree a “Redbud tree.”
Barely literate settlers were colonizing and writing home about the beautiful
PuplePrulePurlpleLavendaarRed-Bud Trees.From what I know, it has to do with the word red covering the purple part of the spectrum long ago, and the “need” for the word purple came out later but purple things that were named red didn’t get renamed.
You can look at japanese right now and 青い covers both blue and green, with a relatively recent addition of 緑 to cover only green (thus possibly pushing 青い in the future to be only blue, who knows)
Well whys it called Shepherds Pie when it doesnt contain shepherds, or Cottage Pie when its nothing to do with cottages or cottagimg? How about that one…checkmate!!!
For bonus points, terms for colors are developed differently but similarly in separate languages: see e.g. ‘Color term’.
Similarly, the red fox is clearly orange, but English speakers were exposed to that species of fox before developing a word for that specific color. For bonus linguistical oddities, ‘orange’ was used for the fruit before it was used for the color.
Or the red squirrel, which is brown.
And red hair.
Yes, the word for greenery/foliage, 青葉, translates to “blue leaves”
Also the green traffic light is called blue
I already knew this about colors (it’s also why “redheads” have orange hair) but I recently dug more into how the musical spectrum and how tones are defined is very similar in it’s cultural variance. Another thing is how the cardinal directions are divided radially and how time is counted. Shit counting bases even, most of the imperial measurements are based on either base 12 or base 16 math.
Wild to think that something you grew up with as a fundamental fact of the world might actually be super culturally subjective.
The skin of red onions is reddish to purple. The flesh is purple much like shallots. But the skin sets them apart.
The inside is purple, but the outside is red, especially if it’s dry.
It refers to the communism of the onions
Like ogres?
We’re all pink on the inside
I’m crying
