Ezra Butler

Personal Updates & Curiosities Today is my birthday and I'm leaving Chicago in June.

Some personal news newsletter.colorphilia.com/personal-upd...

Some Bizarre Questions No answers guaranteed.

This has been a very strange week.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/some-bizarre...

Semiotics and Semaphores: A History of the Polka-Dot The Polka-Dot was inspired by the musical notation used by composers of polkas to create a staccato effect which mimicked the newly invented telegraph.

A different origin story to polka-dots comes from musical notation, polka composers, and Morse code.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/semiotics-an...

Half-Baked Reinterpretations It may surprise the Colorphilia subscriber that I have a lot of half-baked ideas I've been thinking about and researching. In other words, I'm not even pretending to have a central thesis this week. ...

My 60th Colorphilia newsletter is quite half-baked, in honor of various holidays this weekend.

Among other things, I question:
- if Moses wore an actual ram's head with horns on his head
- if the nickname for Richard is from the Arabic term for rooster

newsletter.colorphilia.com/half-baked-r...

Science, Commerce, and Why Indigo is not a Color. Indigo is a pigment, not a color.

I learned a lot more about Newton this week.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/science-comm...

And/or like how when you drive a Mini Cooper, you tend to notice all the other Mini Coopers.

How crazy would it be to suggest that Sir Isaac Newton wanted to add the colors orange and indigo to the spectrum of light, for the same reason Ezekiel thought that the rainbow comprised of was amber, sapphire, and fire.

Or how Aristotle’s was phoenix-red, golden, leek-green, and Tyrian purple.

The seven colors of the rainbow, according to Sir Isaac Newton, according to Crayola.

Spoiler alert for this week’s Colorphilia newsletter.

I didn’t know it, but I was missing two random pieces of information, and once I had them, the history of the color “indigo” (in English) became crystal clear.

And once that fell into place, I suddenly understood the history of color in a completely new light.

#research
Idea:

A interdisciplinary historical journal in which every paper demonstrates a causal or correlative relationship with the price of tea in China.

Stardust and Hope An exploration into the phrase "salt of the earth" in Matthew 5:13.

A nice Jewish boy wrote about his problems with Matthew 5:13 and the phrase “salt of the earth”.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/stardust-and...

Talk about an embarrassment of riches, but if I meet an attractive guy named Matthew in the near future, should my pickup line include a reference to the mistranslation of “lilies” in Matthew 6:28, “gall” in Matthew 27:34, or the “salt of the earth” in Matthew 5:13?

Is this why I’m single?

A Flower by Any Other Name Wouldn't Be As Golden A follow-up to last week's newsletter about Vincent van Gogh and sunflowers.

In his letters, you can notice that the shift in interest in sunflowers came only after he began writing in French, where the word ”tournesol" means “turning to the sun”, and not simply like “zonnebloem" in Dutch.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/sunflowers-a...

Vincent van Gogh, the Sunflower. I've spent months reading van Gogh's letters, and I just created a few collections of sunflowers inspired by him.

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30.

I read his letters last year, and somehow it frustrated me even more when big banks support van Gogh installations and shows, and not living artists.

Sunflowers had become an obsession or a symbol to him. He identified with them. He lived with them.

The irony of this piece is that I quote, both explicitly and implicitly, about a dozen other newsletters I’ve researched, and I would have never arrived at this understanding had I not spent more than a year researching other topics.

It happened to me:

I was sitting at a bar, minding my own business, sipping a delicious, refreshing cocktail, when, in a moment, a line in an essay by Susan Sontag reduced me to tears.

50 Shades of Blue Venus, the Renaissance, salty language, and the color blue.

For this week's Colorphilia newlsetter, I wrote about Venus, profanity, pornography, and the color blue.

There are also two delightful stories about Mary Anne Disraeli, 1st Viscountess Beaconsfield in there.

newsletter.colorphilia.com/50-shades-of...

The Vatican just dropped a new 12th century Ovid?!?!???!!!??!???!????!

Watching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure for the first time, and finding it very anachronistic.

An Ephemeral Color Why is "amarilla", the Spanish word for yellow so different from all other words for yellow?

I researched the etymology of “amarilla” (yellow) for this week’s newsletter. newsletter.colorphilia.com/an-ephemeral...

This manuscript raises some questions for me and now I’m very confused.

It was originally posted as a sort of “subtweet” of an instagram post posted by a dictionary, but your picture makes me very happy. Thank you!

somehow, irish forests are kelly green instead of forest green, this checks out

The word Kelly simply comes from a corruption of the Irish word “coille” meaning grove / wood / forest.

Kelly Green basically means “Forest Green”.

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the floral drawings in medieval translations of Dioscorides may not be completely accurate.

There should be a word for when two completely unrelated things you are researching have a cross-over episode.

Last night, the weather was so nice, I sat in the park and read an English translation of Machiavelli.

Oh, Sušana! A (hopefully) final newsletter about tulips.

Before February began, I was under the impression that tulips had existed for less than a millenium, so I figured that 28 days was more than enough time to sufficiently cover their history.

- Ancient Egypt
- Greco-Roman Architecture
- Illuminated Manuscripts

newsletter.colorphilia.com/oh-susana/

Yesterday I accidentally spent scrolling through Theocritus’ idylls and other Greek bucolics in both the original greek & a 19th c. english translation, and having a panic attack on three separate occasions (only once being to due to reading the mistranslated phrase “the gray-eyed Athena”).