Since ancient times, many human cultures have associated day/light/white with perfection and goodness, and night/dark/black with danger and evil. (For example, white knight, someone who buys a company to save it, and black knight, someone who tries to take over a business when the owner doesn’t want to sell it.) However, English is the language of a culture that does often associate the colour white with things that are pure, with no dirt or no faults – with being “as white as snow.” And the culture also often associates the colour black with bad things, so there are many idiomatic expressions that use these positive and negative senses of the words white and black. When colours in idioms refer to ideas associated with those colours If you say something is “right there in black and white” you are talking about something that is clearly written, black ink on white paper, about which there can be no mistake. Because the colours black and white represent opposites, some idioms also use them to talk about contrasts. The idiom in the black, meaning to have money in your account, comes from the colour of ink: black ink was for positive balances in ledgers, and red ink for negative ones (so “in the red” means to be in debt). Many idioms use a colour because the thing they refer to is that colour: someone with bruises is called black and blue because those are the colours that fresh bruises are. But in many cultures in Asia, white is a colour for funerals, and red is a symbol of good luck. In those same countries, black is worn at funerals, and wearing red can be associated with not having good morals. Not all colour associations are common to all cultures: for instance, after Queen Victoria wore a white wedding dress in the early 19th century, white became associated with bridal purity (=moral goodness) in many English-speaking countries. When colours in idioms refer to actual coloursįrom the earliest recorded literature, humans have associated colours with ideas. You may want to look back at the Black sheep and white lies post because we will mention some of the idioms from that post here. Because we take very seriously our responsibility to help people use English accurately and effectively, we think it’s important to say more about this topic.
IDIOMS ABOUT CHANGE UPDATE
And we update the website frequently, so as the language changes, we also change the advice we give about using it.”Īfter that response, some people asked questions about other idioms that may be racist. We don’t provide word origins on our website, but any words or phrases that are offensive have the label offensive. It’s also true that the words black and white can simply be used as names for colours, and they are widely used that way in many idioms. We replied, “Your instinct to examine the language is a good one, since there are so many words and phrases that have been used in the past which we now see are offensive. One of our readers commented on the second post: she wondered whether any of the expressions to do with the colours black and white were racist in origin. Recently, we’ve posted two about idioms that use names for colours – the first one was Seeing red and green with envy, followed by Black sheep and white lies. Our blog posts about idioms are some of the most popular ones for our readers.