1. What this question is about It is about cases where an adverb apparently modifies a word of a type that adverbs aren’t supposed to be able to modify, like nouns and personal pronouns. It is very much related to this post. Prototypical examples I have in mind: The work is mostly Kim’s. The work … Read more
Raw liver has a distinctive reddish-brown almost purple colour. It is also completely opaque. Is there a name for this sort of colour? My first instinct is mauve, but that’s not quite right. Edit: To put this in context, I would like to describe a chunk of raw liver in a way understandable by a … Read more
How would you refer to a color of a standard brown carton box? I mean, a one, that we normally use day to day for moving or storing stuff, etc. Is it brown or yellow? Dark-yellow or light-brown?Hmmm… I doubt it. The cartons may be indeed darker or lighter colored, but I wonder if there … Read more
Merriam-Webster implies that the comparative and superlative for black are blacker and blackest. However, my native British colleague says he would never used blacker, only more black. How common is using single-word comparatives and superlatives for color-designating adjectives? Is it used for some colors only (like white) whilst not for others (like black)? Would you … Read more
I’m trying to avoid ambiguity when writing a list of items. My confusion comes from describing one item using multiple adjectives versus a list of similar items. My examples are: 1) I ate green apples, yellow apples, and red apples. 2) I ate green, yellow, and red apples. Is the second sentence equivalent to the … Read more
In the expression The sky is blue, is the adjective “blue” an object? Is this a clause or a sentence at all? Answer To answer your first question: blue is not an object in this sentence. It is a complement, more precisely a predicative complement. There are two sorts of predicative complements: subject-related predicative complement … Read more
As part of an answer on another StackExchange site, I have a sentence reading, in part, “[A religious manual] which has quite a long section on [the subject of the question] says …” I was looking at this construction and thinking about whether I should say quite a long section or a quite long section—they … Read more
When is it appropriate to use a hyphen when naming colors? For instance Blue-green has a dash but Teal blue does not. Is there some general English rule that applies? Answer Generally one uses a hyphen for compound adjectives where they precede the noun or noun clause which they describe. For example, I would write … Read more
It seems like most of our names for colors come from our German roots (blue/blau, green/grün, red/rot, etc.). But yellow is gelb in German, amarillo in Spanish, jaune in French, and giallo in Italian. I suppose the Italian seems closest, but perhaps they all have something in common? Answer The word for the colour yellow … Read more
Generally, as a rule, I always hyphenate words to make them into a single adjective, so I’ve been putting “blood-red”, “forest-green”, “royal-blue” and the like, but the moment I typed “royal-blue”, my instincts kicked in. It didn’t look right to me. Perhaps it’s because this is an official colour or the fact that the word … Read more
