Sunday, February 6, 2011

Chartreuse


I've always loved both the word chartreuse and the color, a yellowish green or greenish yellow that graces my front yard every February when the helleborus argutifolius pops out in my front yard garden. Doing a little research, I recently learned that the word chartreuse is a toponym, or a word derived from a place.


The Chartreuse Mountain range in Grenoble, France, was the home of the Carthusian monastery, La Grande Chartreuse, where the monks produced the aromatic liqueur called Chartreuse.






I think I tasted chartreuse once but I didn't like it much. I did enjoy this snippet of poetry, though, found online:


Lost with the sun in a chartreuse wood, afflicted
by associations, flies, thirst, and by
a growing chill my clothes cannot keep out ...



--Elinor Wilner

5 comments:

  1. Hellebore is a favorite. We loved having it in La Jolla. And chartreuse is a color that I like but can't wear. Now, back to the game which I'm finding hard to follow since both teams have on yellow pants!!

    Best,
    Bonnie

    ReplyDelete
  2. you take me places that i enjoy whole hearted.

    charteuse....who knew?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have a funny history with the word "chartreuse" that I had completely forgotten until just now. When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9 and I was learning my more obscure color words, I inadvertently got chartreuse and magenta mixed up. I don't really know how I did that, maybe I learned them both on the same day? But for a while I thought that chartreuse was the intense purpley red and magenta was yellowish green. And also? These were two of my favorite colors.

    The thing is, I have a very strong, nearly photographic memory (or I used to until middle-age-mommy-brain set in) and once something "sets" in there, it is really hard to dislodge. So for years, even after I had had my word snafu corrected? I would automatically picture the WRONG color in my head when I heard or read the color words “chartreuse” and “magenta”.

    Thanks for bringing that back up, this just totally set the way-back machine in my head to 1969. Wow!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Toponym! Let's have a toponym party and wear chartreuse and drink Champagne!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I loved you history and horticulture lesson immensely. As someone who is passionate about language, I really appreciate posts like yours that delve into a word's etymology. Many thanks.

    Greetings from London.

    ReplyDelete