"The Art of Looking Sideways"

<Colorful facts:>

• All languages have black and white. If there are three words, the third is red. If there are four, then it is green or yellow. If six, it is blue. If seven, it is brown.
  
• Even in the Middle Ages there was still no English word for orange.
  
• Mummy was a brown produced from grinding up Egyptian corpses. (Edward Burne-Jones had a funeral for a tube of mummy-paint upon learning the fact, according to Georgiana Burne-Jones.)
  
• Puce is named after the supposed hue of a flea's belly.
• Massachusetts is a tribal word for 'the blue mountains'.
  
• Dorothy Parker went for reds. She painted her living room in nine shades of red: pink, vermilion, scarlet, crimson, maroon, raspberry, rose, russet and magenta.
• Nero peered through an emerald while enjoying lions devouring Christians.
• A raven, seen by another bird, instead of appearing plain and dark, has a dazzling plumage of blue, violet and purple.
  
• Eminence grise
  

<Zestful words:>

• The ancient Greeks, unfamiliar with domesticated horses, had assumed the marauding mounted Scythians were weird beasts and called them Centaurs.
• Tawdry is a contraction of St Audrey, a district in medieval London where they sold cheap clothes.
• Lewis Carroll invented chortle by fusing chuckle and snort.
• Sauntering: itinerants in the Middle Ages begged saying they were on their way to La Sainte Terre - the Holy Land.
• Abecedary: Pertaining to, or formed by, the letters of the alphabet; alphabetic; hence, rudimentary.
• The only two word to contain all the vowels in sequence are 'abstemious' and 'facetious'.
  

<<