Seeing Red.

 There are a lot of colours that are described as “red”. Many of them have a descriptor in front, such as “fire engine red” or “blood red”. Others are descriptors of a different sort such as “burgundy” or “cherry”. “Scarlet” is red, as is “crimson”. As to what it is by definition, an on-line dictionary says it is “of a color at the end of the spectrum next to orange and opposite violet”.

I love red. Bright red. I love to wear it, to use it and admire it in sunsets and roses. I have two red jackets and a red sweater and I used to have, until I got too fat to wear it, a red down-filled winter coat. I have two red hanging lights in my kitchen. If I could grow anything that flowers, I would try for red, red roses.

So, all the colours of red.

Wickipedia says that “Varieties of the color red may differ in hue, chroma (also called saturation, intensity, or colorfulness) or lightness (or value, tone, or brightness), or in two or three of these qualities. Variations in value are also called tints and shades, a tint being a red or other hue mixed with white, a shade being mixed with black. A large selection of these various colors are [sic] shown below.”

Another source tells us that there are 99 varieties of red. I am not about to get into technicalities here. You can, if you have that kind of interest, find lots of information and colour charts and names of varieties here.  or here.

I have a post about ‘red’ that I wrote back when. It can be found here.  The little velvet wonder in the last photo (my grandkid posing for a Christmas card photo) in this post will be hitting her maturity birthday in a few months. She is a student at McGill and, amusingly enough, a Martlet. She is on a university sports team and the McGill identifier is a red bird, a martlet. I have a photo of this. Somewhere. Sigh.

My English as a Second Language students suffered when faced with homonyms. Red, the colour, and the past tense of the verb “to read”, are both pronounced ‘red’ although spelled ‘read’, the same as the present tense. Faces suffused with misery as I explained this, slowly, several times. The definition in my Oxford Reference Dictionary covers four inches of dense type, at eight point type or less. I have not had the courage to look in the big Webster, which has migrated downstairs, at any rate.

If you have read this far, I note that this is another rag bag, but this one filled with red rags. And, just to sweeten the mix, I will end here with a shot of my red-haired daughter in a red Stewart kilt.