Status Updates From The Art of Colour: The Hist...

I’m not enjoying the authors writing style at all, unnecessarily wordy. Way too much annoying alliteration.

'Born to the purple' came from Byzantium, where a room in the Great Palace of Constantinople had been built especially for expecting empresses to deliver in. Its walls were covered with a "violet veneer derived from the igneous rock porphyry (meaning 'purple' in Greek)." Children born there were potential heirs, as opposed to ones who were born prior to his reign.

A corruption of 'naraga' - the Sanskrit word for the familiar citrus fruit - would also become the English word for its color, 'orange.' Before that, the closest word was geoluread, Middle English for "yellowred.'