Where has the word mauve gone

[bunyip]

When I was younger we had the colour, mauve. We had purple or violet for dark deep colour and lilac for light shades. The mindees I've had over the past years all refer to this colour as purple, no matter what the shade. I'm I wrong to now use these variations of shade or is everything now purple!!

If you want to know where colour-words go to die, look no further than mail-order clothes catalogues. These are now the final resting place of: mauve, burgundy, heather (is this lighter or darker than lilac ?), sage, charcoal, and my all-time favourite colour word (and I'm d4mned if I recall what it looks like): the enigmatic 'taupe'.

One subversive way to revive these words is to introduce them into our mindees' action-song-time. If CMs acted as one, we could influence the vocabulary of a generation. As in:-

Mummy: "So what did you do at bunyip's house today?"

Mindee: "I've been bouncing up and down on a terracotta* tractor."


* Or aubergine, avocado, beige, battleship grey, dark-battleship-grey, azure, carmine, cerise, etc. etc. etc.

[Mouse]

Periwinkle.

That's another disappearing colour.

[Dragonfly]

periwinkle??

[Mouse]

periwinkle??

It's a lovely light blue colour

[Maza]

Periwinkle.

That's another disappearing colour.

That's definitely in our current Crayola box!

[Mouse]

That's definitely in our current Crayola box!

Well, I'm glad to hear it

My mindees are all little and only just starting to recognise colours. We're sticking to the plain old red, green, blue etc for now but as soon they they grasp those we're going to branch out and I'll introduce them to the wonders of Crayola colours