colours and feeling

[Jenny Nguyen]

Dear teachers,

Can you explain the meaning of these colours when talking about a person's feeling? For example, feeling blue means sad. How about feeling green, brown and purple?

Thank you.

Jenny

 

[GoesStation]

Feeling blue is an idiom. The other colors don't have comparable idioms.

 

[jutfrank]

We don't normally say we're feeling green, brown or purple. That's only for blue.

However, many colours have associated ideas. For example, green is sometimes associated with envy, sometimes with sickness, and sometimes with inexperience.

 

[teechar]

No, but you can say, e.g.,
I'm not as green as I look. ["Green" means naive in that context.]
I was browned off with his behaviour. ["Browned off" means annoyed in that context.]

 

[Jenny Nguyen]

No, but you can say, e.g.,
I'm not as green as I look. ["Green" means naive in that context.]
I was browned off with his behaviour. ["Browned off" means annoyed in that context.]

I am not sure. Once I went to the teacher's room in a language school. I greeted a Canadian teacher by saying "How are you"? and he replied "I'm feeling green today". He explained to me that feeling green meant feeling calm and nothing special. I'm quite confused.

In Mika lyrics, it was written like this:

I could be brown
I could be blue
I could be violet sky
I could be hurtful
I could be purple

Do you know what it means?​

 

[teechar]

he replied "I'm feeling green today". He explained to me that feeling green meant feeling calm and nothing special.

I've never heard that before. Perhaps it's a Canadian English idiom; though I doubt it.

In Mika lyrics,

​

Song lyrics often don't have specific/clear/obvious meaning, and what you quoted above is no exception!

[cross-posted]

 

[jutfrank]

The Canadian teacher and Mika were being creative with their language use. The way they used those colour-words to mean whatever they meant is not a normal, universal way of using them.

 

[SoothingDave]

I don't know about being "browned off."

 

[teechar]

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/be_browned_off

 

[GoesStation]

I don't know about being "browned off."

It's a BrE thing.

 

[TBJESE]

Not a teacher

Here's a list of colour idioms:

http://www.myenglishteacher.eu/blog/colour-idioms-list-and-their-meanings/

But generally colours don't represent feelings. Blue means sad, green can mean inexperienced (or envious, or sick), yellow can mean cowardly, but they are pretty much all shorthands for other idioms: e.g. "feeling blue", "greenhorn", "green with envy", "green around the gills", "yellow-bellied/livered"

 

[ChinaDan]

If you call someone "yellow", it means you think they are cowardly.

 

[Tdol]

If you are in the pink, you are in good health and in a good mood.

 

[emsr2d2]

Financially speaking, if you're "in the black", your account is in credit. If you're "in the red", your account is overdrawn.