757-1: Feedback, notes and comments

Colour me prefixed Following up last week's comments about words starting in en- and em- for imbuing something with colour, Andrew Palmer and Dave Cook supplied the first sentence of Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native: "A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."

Ian Paterson included embrown in his Dictionary of Colour (2003) and wrote, "Compare empurple and embronze. These appear to be the only three colours bearing the transitive em- prefix. But see also encrimson, engolden, envermeil and envermil." Claire Nolan mentioned both engolden and embronze; the main meaning of the latter is to embody something in bronze, for example a statue, but can also mean to colour something bronze. She also listed the rare verb emblanch, to make white. The OED has both encrimson and envermeil, which means to tinge with vermillion. I can find few examples of its relative envermil, to make red; this is from a poem about fish in the Gentleman's Magazine of May 1740: "The tench, and here the speary perch delight, / Envermill'd all with finns of rosy red". Edward Fisher mentioned that the OED also has engreen.

Russ Willey echoed the comments of many subscribers: "You and Andrew Haynes are only right about the sparsity of verbs for instilling a colour if you're seeking discrete words created with an affix. But plenty of names for colours also act as 'instilling' verbs, without the need any extra letters. Paper yellows with age, campaigners advocate the greening of the environment, inapplicable options on forms are greyed out, fried potatoes are lightly browned, my hair is silvered in a distinguished fashion, and so on. And Shakespeare used 'azured' a couple of times. In fact, the vast majority of colour names are also used as verbs in an instilling sense, although 'to orange' is rare and 'to pink' and 'to maroon' are generally eschewed because those verbs have other meanings."

Enough on this subject, I think!

Correction Professor Robert A Rothstein is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, not at MIT.