Grape Expectorations Trivia Quiz

Answer: Indigo

As a color, indigo is a deep, intense purple with blue undertones.

Fairly common all over the eastern half of the United States, the little songbird known as an indigo bunting is a stunning sight. Their feathers seem to shimmer blue and purple tones in the sunlight. In actuality, not all is as it appears -- these birds' plumage doesn't have any blue pigment at all. The vibrant colors are the product of what's called "structural coloration." More specifically, the "indigo" appearance is an optical illusion. The feathers are actually brown, but they contain keratin, which refracts light in a way that makes it look blue.

The TV show being referred to, "V.R. Troopers," was partly inspired by the success of the "Power Rangers" series. Both series' special-effects-filled battle scenes were actually footage originally used in Japanese action shows for kids. Rather than just a knockoff of "Power Rangers," however, "V.R. Troopers" had its own concept. In effect, the premise played with the idea of "virtual reality" being not simply a simulation, but another world -- another dimension -- that actually existed. When hero and monster fought, the villain could flee to the "Indigo Sector" -- a virtual-world battlefield that augmented the monster's strength.


Per the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word "indigo," originally written as "indico," goes back to the Latin "indicum," and ultimately to the Greek "indikos," meaning "Indian" -- because, well, India is where the dye was originally exported from!

Credit to Cornell University's "Bird Lab" website for some of the info about buntings' appearance.

Answer: Plum

As a color, plum is usually sort of purple with undertones of brown and red, though it sometimes it can be more pale and muted.

Created in the 1940s, the famous board-game "Clue" (or "Cluedo") quickly became quite popular, and today the game and its characters are iconic. The premise is simple: The wealthy Mr. Boddy (aka Dr. Black) hosts six guests at his English mansion one evening, and he is quickly found murdered. The question is, which person did it? With each play of the game, the answer to that is randomly chosen, as well as the specific location and murder weapon. The suspects are Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, Mr. Green, Mrs. White, Mrs. Peacock and Professor Plum. Precisely what he's a professor of has varied between versions of the game, but one thing is clear: He may look unassuming, but he's a bright mind, and just like everyone else, he has his reasons for committing the heinous act.

As for the delightfully dappled Dalmatian, while it's often aptly called the "Firehouse Dog," its other nickname of "Plum Pudding Dog" is decidedly more humorous. Even a check of the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't definitively pin down the first known usage of the term, though we can tell it goes to at least 1943, where it appeared in an Australian newspaper in a short column titled "'Plum Pudding' Dog Returns to Favour." In any event, the whole point is simply that what we call "plum pudding" contains dried grapes or currants, and these dark speckles evidently reminded someone of the Dalmatian's black-or-brown spots. Where things DO get confusing is in trying to talk about "plum pudding" -- this term goes way back to the 1400s, and it referred to a very different food than the one we think of today -- which isn't technically pudding and doesn't contain plums!


The etymology of "plum" is a little murky, but the Online Etymology Dictionary says the ultimate origin is actually an unknown word from an ancient Anatolian language -- but that it, as well as "prune," made their way into Ancient Greek as a word that simply means "plum," and later into the Latin "prunum" -- and the two words kept the same root but 'evolved' in two different directions, one of which saw "R" replaced by "L" (hence "plum" versus "prune") over time.

Credit to Trove, the library-database site, for providing the digitized copy of "The Argus," the old newspaper mentioned, and to "History Today" magazine for some of the info about plum pudding.

Answer: Wisteria

As a color, wisteria is more or less the same as lavender (a pastel shade of purple), but just a little bit lighter.

Regarding the Sierra Madre plant: The "wisteria" genus includes several species of flowering plants, including one called Chinese wisteria. One of these Chinese wisterias, known better as the Sierra Madre Wisteria, holds the official Guinness World Record for "largest blossoming plant." (Sierra Madre is in southern California, in Los Angeles county.) People flock to to see it, especially when it's in full bloom -- it even has its own festival. Guinness' website gives the rundown on just how massive this horticultural wonder is: As of 1994, when the record was awarded, it had 500-foot-long branches, spanned roughly an acre and weighed a little under 50,000 pounds. Guinness and other sources note that every year, over the course of just over one month, it produces between one and two million blossoms. (I think I'll go see it next year!)

As for "Desperate Housewives," Wisteria Lane is the street where most of the characters live. It's about four housewives and their families who live on the lane, each with their own secrets and dramas. The name "Wisteria Lane" conjures images of a picturesque suburb. As storylines unfold, though, it becomes clear things aren't nearly as perfect as they seem. There are secrets and scandals all over. Whether it's a murder mystery, a secret affair or a neighborhood feud, something's always happening on Wisteria Lane. The name is ironic, because it sort of sets up an expectation of a peaceful place, then promptly subverts it by showing what really happens behind closed doors.


Etymologically, "wisteria" was named in honor of Caspar Wistar, a physician and professor in the late-18th and early-17th century. The Biodiversity Heritage Library, a digital library and archive, confirms this in a copy of botanist John Nuttall's 1817 book "The Genera of North American Plants and a Catalogue of the Species." In the entry for "wisteria" it has the note, "In memory of Caspar Wistar, M.D., late professor of Anatomy in the University of Pennsylvania."

Answer: Purple

The color purple, fundamentally, can and does refer to two things: It's a secondary color formed, of course, by combining red and blue, and usually in fairly equal balance. However, it is also a broader term for all the different hues and shades in that part of the spectrum.

Purple carrots -- some people have never heard of them before, while others use them all the time. Having grown (and cooked with) carrots in my own gardens before, I can attest that there is no difference in taste compared to the bright-orange ones. Carrots actually have a number of color variations, and what's really interesting is while ignorant folks tend to treat "purple carrots" as some kind of freakish mutant hybrid, in truth they've existed naturally for at least a thousand years. The orange ones, which are also natural (not cross-bred), came around more recently. Admittedly, purple is admittedly an uncommon color for foods -- but as Healthline explains, when you see a purple coloration in a fruit or vegetable, it means it contains anthocyanins -- which are a particularly powerful, health-giving type of antioxidant.

So what's this business about "purple squirrels"? It sounds like some kind of hallucination -- and that's actually not totally wrong, in a sense. It's regrettably unclear who originated this term (because they must be pretty darn creative), but it looks like it's a very modern one, with the first known usage dating to about the year 2000 or a little before. The whole premise, however, is simply this: Have you ever seen a purple-colored squirrel in real life? No, there is no such thing -- it's just an imaginary creature (and even if one DID exist, it would be exceptionally rare to find). So the idea in recruiting terminology is that it's foolish to try to find a candidate who is so absolutely perfect for a job that they 'tick every box,' with exactly the right experience, knowledge, skills and various other criteria. There are plenty of people who will be excellent, but if you're hiring for a job -- especially if you've a long list of requirements, and want a candidate who meets them all -- then you're looking for a "purple squirrel" -- an impossibly ideal person.


The etymology of "purple," according to combined info from the website "Sensational Color" and from the Online Etymology Dictionary, is that in its earliest form, it was an Ancient Greek word, "porphyra," of obscure origin, and later turned into the Latin "purpura" (referring to a shellfish that was the source of the dye), and after a few rounds with Old English and Middle English, eventually found a home in the spelling used today.

Credit to "USA Today" for info about orange and purple carrots' history.
Credit also to Shannon Anderson's article "None of a Kind: The Fallacy of the Purple Squirrel."

Answer: Magenta

As a color, magenta is another vibrant one -- think of it as taking 'standard' purple, pink, and red and putting them in a high-speed blender. Depending on the exact shade or tint, it can range from a primarily purplish-pink with faint red undertones to a deeper, slightly darker color with a more-pronounced red. By most dictionaries, "magenta" and "fuchsia" are synonymous.

"Magenta tongue" is a medical condition, though it probably more readily calls to mind the kind of temporary bright stain you might see in the mirror after eating, say, too many grape popsicles or beets. Medically, however, it's a whole different story. It's not so much a disorder unto itself as it is a telltale symptom of one -- a vitamin deficiency. Actually, it can be caused by a lack of either B2 (riboflavin) or B12 (cobalamin) -- or both. As much as B2 deficiency can cause a wide variety of issues, when B12 is lacking, things can get far worse -- and deadly if not treated. In both cases, the discoloration is usually a result of anemia -- the body not producing enough red blood cells.

The Battle of Magenta -- a defining moment in the mid-19th-century Second Italian War of Independence -- is rather unusual in that it has two different explanations for its name. It's entirely possible that both ideas are true, but let's see what they actually are. First, it IS certain that the battle took place in quite close proximity to the town of Magenta, in Lombardy, a region in north-central Italy. The other thought, actually isn't presented by some people as an "alternate" origin for the battle's name but simply as an "additional layer" -- a sort of dual-origin. So what is this other idea? Well, for context, let's understand what was going on with the war: The Italians were sick and tired of being under Austria's dominance, and they were joined by France, which had its own reasons for wanting to weaken Austria. Some of France's elite regiments, called the Zouave, evidently had distinctive outfits, including vibrant red slacks, and somewhere along the line, the idea came up that this made "Magenta" a doubly fitting name for the battle near that town. So while there's no clear answer on *who* gave the conflict that name, both suggestions seem to "co-exist" just fine.


The etymology of "magenta" isn't absolutely proven, though the leading thought seems pretty persuasive. Actually, "magenta" as a color was named for the Battle of Magenta, itself mostly named for the town it happened near, but that begs the question: Where did the *town* get the name from, then? Back to the Online Etymology Dictionary again, which summarizes the majority opinion: "Magenta" was taken from Marcus Aurelius Valerius *Maxentius*, a fourth-century Roman emperor. (Good luck fitting THAT name on a luggage tag!)

Sources for the "magenta tongue" discussion were primarily from the Oxford Reference website and from an article at the NIH's National Library of Medicine.
Some info about the Battle of Magenta's naming is from the "Sensational Color" website.

Answer: Violet

As a color, violet is sort of a light-to-medium purple with blue undertones.

Ah, Violet Beauregarde. From Roald Dahl's wonderful classic "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," of course. Except for Charlie Bucket himself, all four of the other kids who found one of the Golden Tickets are just plain disagreeable, self-concerned and don't show respect to Willy Wonka or his grand confection-making factory. Violet is a competitive girl with a particular obsession for gum-chewing. Partway through the tour of the place, Wonka takes everyone to the "Inventing Room," where there's a great big machine with "hundreds of thin glass tubes," with a different-colored liquid flowing through each one and into a vat. When it produces a small object, Violet is the first to recognize it's gum -- but not just any. No, it's a complete dinner in one stick. Violet disregards Wonka's cautions that it's still experimental and pops in the gum, and when the blueberry-pie dessert comes, she turns ... well, violet ... from head to toe and swells up like a balloon. She's taken off to another room to "squeeze the juice out of her."

As for the shrinking violet, this is an interesting case of one term with two uses -- one literal and one figurative -- but more or less having the same meaning. What's a little ironic though is that the "shrinking" part tends to give the idea that the flower is actually some tiny little thing. (Presumably, nobody thinks that it means a flower that's seeing a psychiatrist. That's a whole other kind of "shrink.") No, actually, there are hundreds of species, with much variation in size and other qualities. But in general, the idea for the flower is that compared to other plants, it tends to prefer shaded areas, sometimes hidden amidst larger plants, and botanists noted its sort of ... "inconspicuous" nature. Violets, usually demure and pretty little flowers, have pretty much been associated since antiquity with modesty, shyness, delicacy and the like -- and loved for both their color and fragrance -- and "shrinking violet" seems to date to the early 19th century for the flower. All that said, it isn't clear how long it was before someone decided to reimagine the phrase as a more "flowery" way of describing people too -- those who would rather keep to themselves in social situations. Kind of makes you wonder about the similar case of the term "wallflower," doesn't it!


Etymologically, "violet" is mercifully much easier to follow than some of these other words. Using both Wiktionary and the Online Etymology Dictionary to walk backwards through time, we find Middle English using "violet" (with various spellings) borrowing from French "violette," which in turn is using the Latin word "viola," which itself more or less means "purple." The thought is that the Latin form was itself based on a word from Ancient Greek, but it gets hard to tell what the de-facto original language was.

The only source used in the discussion of Roald Dahl's story was the book itself.
Credit for some of the info about shrinking violets is from a Grammarist.com article.

Answer: Periwinkle

As a color, periwinkle is sort of a soft, pale, purplish-blue with a little bit of a gray undertone.

"Periwinkle Blue" is, as stated, a Doris Day song -- quite lovely really, from a 1961 album titled "I Have Dreamed," from Columbia Records. Most of the album's songs have "dream" in the title, and most of them follow anything from recollections to looking to the future -- and thinking of what might have been and/or what might someday be. But our focus is this particular song, of course. In 1959, it was originally sung by jazz singer Sue Raney, though Doris Day's version is the better-known. AllMusic (and other sites) all cite Jerry Livingston and Paul Francis Webster as having written the music and lyrics. In context, "periwinkle blue" is mentioned a few times in the lyrics -- "On the day that he says 'I do' to me, I'll be dressed up in my best gown of periwinkle blue." It's an evocative color for a dreamy song whose first lines begin, "Periwinkle blue, periwinkle blue, that's the color of the skies when the one you love loves you." The song is the words of a woman in love, and to her, when you're in love, everything seems to have that ethereal tint -- that of the happiness and hopefulness that comes with being in love.

On a much different note, many people may well remember "Old Man Periwinkle" from the iconic game show "Match Game." In its '60s iteration, it was just straight fill-in-the-blank phrases, but come the early '70s, it was decided that the questions should have a heavy dose of humor. So instead of people being asked for answers to, say, "(BLANK) dog," they might get something like, "Old Man Periwinkle was so old, even his dentures have (BLANK)," leaving a wide-open door for all sorts of silly answers -- of course, nothing indelicate or improper or the like was allowed. But the choice of using anecdotal-style one-liners was a hit, and so a whole parade of odd, imaginary characters were featured in the questions. Some of the best-remembered included names like Dumb Donald, Weird Willie, Ugly Edna, Farmer Bob and Old Lady Perkins. By most accounts, though, Periwinkle was the favorite, because host Gene Rayburn would switch to a "mumbling little old man" voice for those questions, to everyone's great amusement.


As regards the etymology of "periwinkle," it again gets confusing quickly because it had two different meanings -- one referred to a plant and the other was a sea snail, and they seem to have little to no shared origins. To help suss this out, we can turn to linguistics student Adam Aleksic's "The Etymology Nerd." This is his summary, which most other sources seem to agree with: The first usage -- and the one that also made the word a color -- was for the flower, and the second word eventually saw its spelling evolve to become one and the same. More precisely, for the flower: "Periwinkle" goes back to Middle English, then to Old English, spelled such ways as "perwince" and "perfince" -- and this goes back to the Latin "pervinca," the original word for the flower but whose precise meaning isn't clear. As for the sea snail, this version of "periwinkle" came by taking the Old English words "pine" and "wincel" ("mussel" and "spiral shell", respectively), creating "pinewincel," which gradually was morphed into the spelling we know today.

The website called Musixmatch provided the lyrics for the "Periwinkle Blue" song.

Answer: Amethyst

As a color, amethyst is pretty much a pure, rich purple without any particular undertones.

Well, Iggy Azalea is certainly a popular singer -- rap, like any genre, can be an acquired taste, but she's definitely got a good voice. Her given name, Amethyst Amelia Kelly, has a decidedly prettier ring to it, though I guess "Iggy Azalea" is short and catchy. As a given name, "Amethyst" is named for the precious stone of the same name, which is a bright purple quartz. (The website "Behind the Name" says that the Greek word for the stone, amethystos, means "not drunk," as it was believed in ancient times to protect against intoxication.) In an interview, with the music-website "Idolator," she said that for her stage name, "Iggy" was a pet dog of hers, and she grew up on Azalea Street, so she fused the two. Interesting to note is that Amethyst has a sister named Emerald -- there's a theme! While there's never been any discussion about the parents' choice of names, precious stones -- which of course share a name with their color -- do seem oftentimes an attractive choice, as gems and their colors are often given symbolic meaning. That, and when you think of a gemstone, you tend to think of something that's renown for being rare, beautiful and very valuable -- so it's not hard to see how a name like Amethyst would be a distinctive, intriguing one to have.

Speaking of names, equally interesting is what's called in Latin "Laccaria amethystina" -- meaning "shiny/varnished amethyst" -- but most often called "amethyst deceiver." Doesn't that just sound like it could be the name for anything from a book title to some sort of sci-fi creature? Someone was feeling literary! Anyway, it's a mushroom. What I find most interesting about the whole choice of name is that while it was named "amethyst deceiver" because its color can change so drastically, there's a whole OTHER reason you could call it that: Because it looks a whole lot like another 'shroom called "Inocybe lilacina" in Latin -- "lilac fibrecap" more commonly -- and THIS one is poisonous, even deadly! All of which to say, the featured fungus is safe to eat, but remember that its name is for the fact that age and sunlight both cause the coloration to fade from striking purple to generic grey. And even if you do find a purple mushroom, make absolutely sure you know which one it is: The benign "amethyst deceiver" or the toxic lookalike.


Back to the Online Etymology Dictionary yet again, here's the history of "amethyst" -- as discussed above, the original Greek word means "not intoxicated"; from there it went to Latin and Medieval Latin, being changed from the Greek spelling to "amethystus" and then "amatistus," respectively; when it got into French, it became "amethyste," and penultimately became "ametist" in Middle English before finally landing in the modern spelling -- which actually is closer to the Ancient Greek! Talk about going full-circle. As an side-note, amethyst has a whole different name AND superstition in Hebrew: "Strong's Concordance" says the Hebrew name for it is "achlamah," literally "dream-stone," because it was once thought to bring pleasant dreams. No etymological overlap, but just worth noting the interesting difference. The more you know!

Credit to the "Wild Food UK" website for info about both mushrooms.

Answer: Mauve

As a color, mauve is basically a muted, dusty-looking shade of purple with undertones of pink and/or grey -- though it has variations with brighter, bolder, deeper purples.

Actually, "Perkin's Mauve" is both the color itself (if a somewhat older term for it) but also a reference to his discovery of it. It's sort of self-referential, if you will. The French chemist William Perkin didn't name it for himself; HIS initial term for the discovery was "Tyrian purple" and later called "aniline purple." (This was the first synthetic dye ever created, and it was made of aniline, a chemical compound.) Accounts conflict somewhat of precisely when he also used the term "Mauveine" -- the name he had patented it under -- mostly when dealing with chemists to market his dye. For the general public, it was simply called "mauve." Things do get a little fuzzy when trying to follow all the zigs and zags of its timeline, though the short of it is, it was all the rage mainly between 1859-61; it remained popular for some time but also began to run into stiff competition as more and more hue variations -- and shades of purple in general -- came on the scene. People were frankly fickle about what tint was the one to wear, in any given year, so it was really sort of a veritable flurry of purples and mauves, all shifting around in popularity -- though purple in general remained one of the more fashionable choices for a good few decades. The way things are now in modern times, the terms often get a bit conflated and jumbled around, though the mauve we tend to think of and refer to is the more greyish, pastel one, not so much the vibrant variants -- "mauve" sort of does double-duty as both a particular color but also a broader term for all the various purples that have at one time or another been called "mauve" or "Perkin's mauve."

Fairly directly related to all of this is the "Mauve Decade" -- 1890 to 1900, just about -- when the original, more-vibrant "mauve" had since given way to a much more muted, understated version. Because Queen Victoria was often seen in this greyer shade, that was really what got the ball rolling for a decade of people directly associating the color with, and using it as, basically a status symbol -- or at least it was a way of conveying that you were sophisticated, refined, well-to-do. Or at least, that last sentiment was sort of what people were telling themselves. In truth, yes, mauve was very popular in the 1890s, and to some it felt refined and all that, but in truth, "Mauve Decade" was coined in 1926 by writer Thomas Beer. In his view, the 1890s were actually a time full of challenging and upending of traditional morals and attitudes -- and not for the better, because he felt pretentiousness and shallowness were fueling a lot of these changes. So he penned "The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century" as a reflection on and criticism of the way things had changed under the auspices of "mauve" and why it was actually associated with far more radical new cultural ideas than the sophistication the color once connoted. Obviously, it's an extraordinarily involved discussion, all but impossible to do full justice to.


Since the matter has been pretty well covered above, but just to give a roundup of odds and ends about "mauve's" etymology, it's thankfully pretty clear-cut. Yet again returning to Online Etymology Dictionary, "mauve" in English comes from the same word in French, which means "mallow" and refers to a purplish plant. Both "mallow" and "mauve" ultimately go back to the Latin word "malva," which is believed to have its origins in an ancient Semitic language; though those oldest details are lost to history, leaving the true origin-word quite unknown.

A great many sources were used for the discussion of both terms, including the text of Beer's own book, as well as "Brewer's Dictionary of Modern Phrase & Fable," Wikipedia, the Collins English Dictionary, the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" (about Perkin), ScienceDirect (et al) about mauveine, an article titled "Mauveine: The First Industrial Organic Fine-Chemical," and the "Bikes and Bloomers" website.

Answer: Lavender

As a color, lavender is a light, pastel purple color, usually with greyish-blue (or sometimes slightly pink) undertones.

Well, "Lavender Blue" seems to have begun life as a late-17th-century folk-song that may actually have been referred to as "Lavender *Green*" in earliest iterations. The meaning of this isn't quite clear, but the oldest version of the lyrics seem a touch suggestive, though not in any crude way. The different variations of the folk song and all more or less revolve around an implied romantic courtship, with the first line usually reading, "Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, lavender's green,/ When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen." In more modern times, however, the song -- slightly retitled to "Lavender Blue (Dilly Dilly)" was made very popular in 1948, when Burl Ives sang it for the Disney movie "So Dear to My Heart," a terribly overlooked, charming little movie about a boy who perseveres in caring for a lamb. To a degree, it's one of those "you have to see it to really appreciate it" kind of films -- it has a certain idyllic quality that's hard to do justice to in words. The use of "Lavender Blue" takes the folk-song's lyrics and sort of extends the meaning to suggest that the boy's fondness for his lamb is another of the many forms love can take, like a child for his or her pet.

The 2015 Disney movie "Cinderella" also used the same song, though with tweaked lyrics implying a back-and-forth dialogue between a man and a woman. The idea becomes more direct, because it's two people in love saying that if and when they became monarch, they'd need their counterpart (king/queen) by their side to be happy. In "Cinderella," this seems like a sort of foreshadowing of the happy ending for the maiden and the prince, because a prince and princess will someday be king and queen -- and well, there's no need to rehash how the movie's story of Cinderella and the Prince ends. As with the Doris Day song of "Periwinkle Blue," this one too seems mainly to use a bluish-purple to evoke a sort of dreamy, romantic feel to the idea of people who are in love and thinking to a not-too-distant future day.

The last stop here is Lavender Town, which is a place in the very-popular Pokemon franchise of games. It's really hard to try to enumerate, much less explain, all the myriad games, so suffice it to say that if the premise overall is about players attempting to catch and train various imaginative creatures -- called Pokemon, for "pocket monsters" -- then a handful of games touch on the premise of a graveyard-like town inhabited by the ghosts of Pokemon who have died. A little morbid for a series that attracts a lot of young players, to be sure. The prevalence of purple both in name and visually gives an unsettling, eerie ambience. A lot of players said they found the background music especially creepy -- and listening to it myself, I get what they're saying -- but it's not necessarily a bad thing for games to use moods and motifs that diverge from the usual, more-chipper feel and make the imaginary worlds and stories more intriguing.


For the etymology of "lavender," I'll defer to the Online Etymology Dictionary's summary of how the word traces its roots: The current spelling goes back to an older spelling, "lavendre," in both Anglo-French and Old French; this in turn goes further back to the Medieval Latin "lavendula," which is thought to be related to the Latin "lividus," which means "bluish" and would likely be related to a similar Latin word "lavare," "to wash."

Credit to the "All Nursery Rhymes" and "Lyrics Freak" websites for some of the info about, and lyrics to, "Lavender Blue."
"What the Weird World of Pokemon Can Teach Us About Storytelling," an article online at The Guardian, was the primary source for info about the games.