Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today we're going to talk about blue idioms and then about the difference between being plum out of something and getting a plum job assignment.
In this segment, we'll take a look at phrases that use the color blue.
First up is politics.
These days in the United States, we hear about red states and blue states, where red refers to states that reliably vote for Republicans and blue refers to states that reliably vote for Democrats.
But these designations are newer than you might think.
Labeling the states with such partisan colors began with the TV station NBC, the first all-color network, in 1976.
The anchor explained how states that voted for the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, were going to be blue and those in favor of the Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter, would be red—the opposite of how we think of it today.
In subsequent elections, other TV stations adopted their own color schemes.
No official standard was adopted, however, so the public became confused.
It wasn't until the hotly contested 2000 presidential election that red came to definitively mean Republican and blue came to definitively mean Democratic, both in political discourse and on TV.
Number two on our list is blue in the face.
When someone does something until she is blue in the face, she's feeling frustrated and exasperated.
For example, a mother can tell her slovenly son to clean up his room until she is blue in the face.
Unfortunately, in this case, the room will probably stay messy.
The meaning of blue in this expression originates in medicine.
When you're deprived of oxygen, such as when talking breathlessly or angrily, your skin turns bluish.
Our third phrase or expression containing the color blue refers to money.
The phrase blue chip, as in blue chip stocks, refers to large, well-established companies that are likely to be household names and to pay dividends to stockholders.
Examples are the cereal maker General Mills and the shipping company United Parcel Service.
In 1904, blue chip came to mean of high value and around 20 years later came to be associated with valuable companies.
Why blue and not some other color?
Well, at the turn of the 20th century, blue poker chips were very valuable.
Today, chip color varies from casino to casino, so blue chips can be worth a lot or a little, which feels not so different from the stock market.
Next on our list is the blue plate special.
This phrase refers to a daily special that is a complete meal at a reduced price.
The origin is uncertain, but it may refer to a plate that was actually blue.
When you go to a diner for a blue plate special, your meal might be served on a blue plate with several sunken compartments for potatoes, meat and greens.
Dictionarycom tells us the phrase blue plate originated from 1940 to 1945, but it may be 50 or so years older than that.
In the 1890s, the Fred Harvey Company developed a chain of restaurants that serviced various railroad routes as well as the dining cars themselves, and the restaurants used faux wedgewood plates with a blue design.
The next meaning associated with the word blue moves us from inexpensive food to noble blood.
English uses several blue-themed expressions to have this elevated connotation, such as blue ribbon and blue blood.
When you win a blue ribbon, you've earned the top honor, and the term dates from 1645 or so.
Back in the day, the British monarchy gave out the Order of the Garter to well-deserving knights, and this honor was a bright blue ribbon.
Blue may also be associated with royalty because blue dyes used to be rare and expensive.
The expression blue blood, which originates from 1809, refers to a person of noble origin.
It seems that members of the Spanish royalty wanted to claim that their blood was pure, which to them meant free of Moorish or Jewish ancestry.
It's also possible that the association between blue and royalty stems from the simple fact that the blood in the veins of pale individuals appears blue through the skin.
Two, medical disorders may also be relevant to the association between the color blue and royalty.
One is called agyria, a condition that turns the skin a bluish color because of chronic exposure to silver.
Silver is expensive and was more likely to be used by rich people than the masses.
The second disorder can be traced back thousands of years.
It seems that there are blue-skinned mummies from Egypt, and perhaps the lack of genetic diversity among the ancient elite caused a disorder called methemoglobinemia.
The skin of individuals with this problem is slate gray-blue.
Let's hope these conditions become even more rare, the next meaning of blue.
If you want to indicate that something happens rarely, then you might use the phrase once in a blue moon.
In extremely rare cases, the moon might actually look blue after a volcanic eruption because of the dust particles in the air, but that likely isn't the origin of the expression.
This phrase goes as far back as medieval England and originally meant impossible, as in when pigs fly.
Nowadays, on the other hand, the term blue moon describes a real and rare astronomical phenomenon, and once in a blue moon has had the meaning rare since about 1821.
There are actually two scientific definitions of a blue moon.
First, there are four astronomical seasons spring summer, fall and winter and each season normally has three full moons.
When there's a fourth full moon in one season, that's called a seasonal blue moon.
The second definition of blue moon is a second full moon in one month, which is called a monthly blue moon.
Whichever meaning you wish to use, a blue moon won't happen often.
According to timeanddatecom, the next seasonal blue moon will be on May 20th 2027 and the next monthly blue moon will be on May 31st 2026.
The seventh meaning of blue is pornographic, as in the phrase blue movie.
The word blue has meant obscene since 1820, and Dictionarycom's seventh definition of blue is marked by blasphemy.
The origins of this association with the color are murky.
Two theories are that it's related to the blue gowns that ladies of the night were made to wear when imprisoned, and that certain undesirable French books were bound in blue paper covers.
Another phrase associated with off-color language is blue humor, which refers to dirty jokes.
It's interesting that the next meaning of blue is the polar opposite of what we just said, in this case, puritanical.
The term blue laws refers to state or local laws that prohibit certain activities on Sundays.
And many of these laws came about because of religious ideals.
For example, some blue laws prevented stores from being open, didn't permit merchants or laborers to work and prohibited the sale of liquor and tobacco on Sundays.
And some blue laws are still in force.
But the origin of the term is unclear.
One theory is that it comes from the color of the paper on which these laws were written, but there's not much evidence to back that up.
Two more meanings of blue to go.
The next to the last meaning is perhaps the most common connotation.
When you're feeling blue, you're sad.
This melancholy meaning of blue has been around since 1385, when Chaucer used the term.
A related idiom is in a blue funk.
Some people suffer from seasonal affective disorder, appropriately labeled SAD, where sufferers start being depressed around fall and the feeling continues through winter.
These people might experience what's known as a blue Christmas, a sad Christmas, and Elvis sang a song with this title.
Which brings us to our last tidbit about the color blue.
This color, along with the color white, is widely associated with the Jewish holiday Hanukkah.
The reason might seem obvious to those who know that the Israeli flag is blue and white.
This flag was designated in 1891 and adopted in 1948.
The flag's stripes are blue because they represent the blue thread that the Torah commands be used on the fringe of the prayer shawl, known as the tzitzit.
The dye that makes the thread blue comes from a shellfish that lives in the Mediterranean Sea.
That segment was written by Bonnie Mills, who's been a copy editor since 1996.
Last week I said I was plum out of familects and, as is so often the case, that got me thinking.
Why do we say we're plum out of something?
Is it related to the fruit?
The plumbing in the bathroom?
What's the deal?
Well, first the plum.
Out of things, plum is spelled with a, B at the end, so it's not related to the fruit.
It is related to the water pipes in your house, though, at least distantly.
Plum with a B is one of those words that's had a few different jobs over the years.
It comes from the Latin word plumbum, which means lead, as in the metal, not the thing you did at a meeting last week.
The pipes in your house are called plumbing because they were originally made of lead.
And being plum out of something comes from the metaphorical extension of a construction tool called a plumb line.
This is a string with a lead weight at the end that carpenters use to make sure walls and other structures are perfectly vertical.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this use of plum goes all the way back to the 1400s.
But even today, builders still talk about whether a wall is plum or not.
And then, because the weight hung straight down, the word plum soon became associated with the somewhat more metaphorical idea of something being straight or exact.
And then it expanded even more to become an intensifier.
By 1588.
You can find the word plum in print to mean completely or absolutely, and the OED says it often showed up in negative contexts.
So you find examples of people being described as plum crazy or plum stupid.
It has a broader meaning today and you'll find people saying things like they are plum surprised or someone is plum adorable, but the most common uses are still negative.
Plum crazy is by far the top phrase you'll find in the corpus of contemporary American usage, followed by plum afraid, plum full, plum dumb, plum lost and plum awful.
Plum.
But three of those plum crazy examples are actually positive to describe attraction.
Like that dog is plum crazy about you from the movie My Dog Skip.
So it can go either way.
So now you might be wondering if plum, the fruit, is somehow related.
Did the B just get dropped somewhere along the way?
Well, nope.
These are completely different words from completely different origins.
Plum.
The fruit comes from the Old English plume P-L-U-M-E, which came from the Latin prunum, which was also the word for the fruit.
This plum can be used to describe things too, though in much the informal way we use the other plum, but in this case it's positive.
You can say you got a plum assignment, for example, and people think that comes from thinking about the best, sweetest parts you can pick out of plum pudding.
Think of little Jack Horner.
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said, what a good boy am I?
That plum was the good bit, the prize.
So next time you're plum out of milk or plum out of patience, you can think of a little lead weight dangling from a string.
And remember to spell it with a B, like the plumbing in your house.
And if you're writing about a plum job assignment, you can think of little Jack Horner and his sweet, sweet plum the fruit.
Finally, I have a familect story.
Hello, Mignon.
I have a familect expression for you, one used to describe strength.
In the theme song of Popeye, the Sailor Man animated cartoon series, Popeye declares I am strong to the finish because I eat my spinach.
Apparently, both my husband and I have been language nerds from a young age, specifically with regard to rhyming.
This may be one of the things that keeps our relationship fun.
In childhood we both understood Popeye to declare that he is strong to the binnage because he eats his spinach.
So we can't make spinach salad without mentioning its likely effects on our physical strength.
And we use the term generally to describe strength, both literally and metaphorically.
Is the rope strong enough?
Yeah, it's strong to the binnage.
Thank you for your show, for your strong work.
It is strong to the binnage.
Thanks for the great story.
And I still need more of yours.
If you want to share the story of your familect a special word or phrase you use with only your family leave a message with your story on the voicemail line at 83-321-4GIRL, or leave a voice message in WhatsApp chat.
And that link is in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Dan Feyerabend in audio, Morgan Christensen in advertising, Rebecca Sebastian in marketing, Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, and Nat Hoops in marketing, who was once on a plane that had to make an emergency landing because of an electrical failure.
Wow.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip-a-day book, The Grammar Daily.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
