'Where the need is sorest, there the help comes soonest'

[flemmings]

(Optimistic idiots, the 18th C, weren't they?)

Every so often someone provides you with a word for something that up till then you've suffered from having no word for. Like 'peach-flower eyes', yes indeed. So today, stumbled over on incandescens' f'list and fallen on with cries of joy by myself, is the word for overcast Toronto skies through most of the winter- and spring and summer, come to that: greige.

In fact I remember the odd sense of mental dislocation in Tokyo February at being presented with a sky that was grey. Just that: grey. No shadings of lighter or darker, or even white or off-white or silver, but a flat monochrome medium grey to the horizon, like a painted ceiling. Almost apocalyptic, it was.

(FTR today is Wednesday. I like everything about Pumpkin Elegant except that it won't give days of the week.)

Comments

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

Oh. I don't know that one. Had to look it up.

*share mode on* Web 11: From French grege (with grave accent that LJ ignores), raw (of silk)." [1926] Being in an unbleached undyed state as taken from a loom -- used of textiles." Says pronunciation is (a bit) like "grey-zh."

[incandescens]

Interesting! Thanks.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Etymology apart, I'm calling it a portmanteau of grey and beige, which is what the skies certainly are.

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

I've never seen undyed silk, but I have seen lots of undyed wool. I'm thinking maybe like that color. (Which is sort of a dirty gray noncolor, really.) Bleh.