Word of the week: Pink

When I Googled “Barbie movie” yesterday, my screen blushed pink, with the Google wordmark standing out in darker pink.

 

Thanks to the movie-based-on-a-doll that opened last weekend, pink is the unofficial color of the year. It’s there in the bubble-gum-hued capital B on the movie poster.

It’s even the title of Lizzo’s contribution to the soundtrack.

“When I wake up in my own pink world / I get up outta bed and wave to my homegirls…”

 

I haven’t yet seen the film, but I’ve read thousands of words about it—enough to know that pink is its “signature vibrant aesthetic,” as Scientific American put it. (SciAm was interested in the psychological angle. “If Barbie was exposed to a single color her whole life, she wouldn’t necessarily register the world as pink but would instead likely see it as gray or neutral,” the magazine reported.)

I did my own research into pink and came up with these findings:

Pink, the color name, probably comes from pink, the name of the flower also known as dianthus or carnation. The flower may have gotten its name, around 1570, from its “pinked” or serrated petals. “Pink” as a color name first appeared in print around 1670.

Pink pinks. “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)” was a hit for Marty Robbins in 1957.

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Before pink entered the lexicon, how did English-speakers describe a color between red and white? Educated types may have used incarnation (“of the flesh”—the flower name carnation has the same meaning). But mostly they probably just said red, a word that has been with us since Old English and which has traditionally covered a wide range of hues and shades.

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Pink can cover a lot of semantic ground, too. The hunting pinks worn by fox hunters—jackets and other garments—are brilliant scarlet. According to one theory, the clothes got their name from an 18th-century London tailor named Pink.

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The Barbie doll that debuted in 1959 was not clad or packaged in pink: She wore a strapless one-piece black-and-white swimsuit. The enclosed brochure had a pale- pink cover, but that was it; the pink packaging didn’t come along until the 1970s.

An Etsy seller is asking $12,500 for this original Barbie. It pains me a little to tell you that I once owned this very model; my parents sold it at a garage sale, without consulting me, while I was away at college.

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There is a Pantone color called Barbie Pink. (Its identifying number is 219C.) In 2011, Mattel released a Pantone Barbie Doll wearing a dress made of Pantone color chips.

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“In the pink” means “in excellent health or spirits.”

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Pinking shears are specialized scissors that create serrated or scalloped edges, which prevent fabric from fraying.

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Color has nothing to do with pinky finger or pinky toe. This pinky (or pinkie) comes from a Scots word meaning “small.”

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The 1986 John Hughes teen rom-com Pretty in Pink took its title from a 1981 song by the London-based post-punk bank the Psychedelic Furs. 

Pretty in Pink poster

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As those infamous gender-reveal parties have reminded us, often explosively, “pink is for girls, blue is for boys.” But that color-typing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the 1940s, pink was considered a “stronger” color—a form of red—and therefore more suitable for boys; blue was deemed “delicate and dainty.”

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Pinko has been a North American slang term since the 1920s, describing a person who is left-leaning, socialist, or “a little bit Red.” (For more on the use of the -o suffix in derogatory terms, see my 2018 post on sicko.)

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The original sense of pinkwashing, from about 2010, refers to breast-cancer cause marketing: pinning pink-ribbon logos on everything from energy drinks to KFC chicken, to signal support for breast-cancer research or prevention. (See my 2011 post on “Big Pink.”) More recently, pinkwashing has signified “the deployment of superficially sympathetic messages for [ends] having little or nothing to do with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) equality or inclusion” (Wikipedia).

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A pink slip has meant a discharge notice since about 1915. According to Etymonline, “pink slips had various connotations in employment in the first decade of the 20th century, including a paper signed by a worker to testify he would leave the labor union or else be fired.”

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Long before Barbie, and even before the Barbie doll, Kay Thompson turned pink into an anthem. Here she is in Funny Face (1957), leading a chorus of fashion-magazine editors in “Think Pink!”

 

UPDATE: Barbie and the cinematic history of weaponized pink, from Legally Blonde to Elvis, by Tom and Lorenzo

Comments

[Darkstar in the Morning]

My favorite line from Funny Face is where after telling the fashion magazine staff that pink is the color of the year, and everyone on staff switching to it, someone asks her if she's going to wear pink and she says something along the line of "I wouldn't be caught dead!"

There is also Bruce Springsteen's song "Pink Cadillac".

[WizardOfDocs]

Okay, but how about "pink slip" meaning an ownership document for a car?

[Nancy Friedman]

WizardofDocs: The automotive sense of "pink slip" originated in California, where title certificates were printed on pink paper "to keep car owners from accidentally throwing out this vital piece of paper with other trash like an outdated vehicle registration notice." The practice was discontinued in 1988, but by then the slang term had migrated to other states. Source: Car and Driver. https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a31863468/pink-slip-car/