14th August ’17: Cobalt goblins

Welcome to a new week, folks.

Looking out of my window today, I can see the Atlantic and I’m thinking ‘glas’. I remember my mum (a Welsh-speaker) telling me that glas means so much more than just ‘blue’ and is used to describe anything from azure through to sky blue, greenish blue or sea green (it’s apparently from the Proto-Celtic ‘glasto’ meaning ‘green’) and today I can see why. Colour name origins excite me. What I wouldn’t do for a time machine so I could return to days of old and hear folks squabbling about colours. One I’d particularly like to witness is ‘cobalt’, named by Bohemian miners because they believed that the pigment contained ‘kobolds’ – goblins – which caused them difficulties when trying to refine it. I shall never see blue in quite the same way again.
Martha, The Colour File x 

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