Hue knew?

Yellow becomes defiance. Green becomes love. And “orange” didn’t even exist for ancient English speakers. Let’s explore some shades of color and meaning.

Author

Greg Sullivan
June 06, 2025

🍌 Peeling back the legend of The Mamas and The Papas’ musical rebellion

For decades, Michelle Phillips’ simple act and the coy look were taken as an act of disdain. They were something else.

Lip-syncing happens. Sometimes it’s technical. Sometimes laziness. Sometimes... let’s be honest, it’s a skill issue.

Still, the true legends hate faking it. Queen famously dodged a Top of the Pops mime job by inventing the “Bohemian Rhapsody” music video. At the 1994 AMAs, Alan Jackson’s drummer went full chaos mode, windmilling his arms during the performance to make sure everyone knew the score.

Then there’s Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas. In a now-iconic 1967 Ed Sullivan Show clip, she sings "California Dreamin’" while slowly peeling and eating a banana, staring defiantly into the camera the entire time. Fans and media saw it as an act of rebellion that showed her disdain for the very idea of lip-syncing.

Except... it wasn’t.

“It was so random,” Phillips later explained in a YouTube chat with her daughter, Chynna Phillips. “We were just lip-syncing to the song, and I looked over, and there was this plate of fruit... so I just reached over and started peeling it, and I ate it!”

No manifesto. No silent protest. Just a bored singer, an awkward vibe, and a banana that happened to be in arm’s reach.

Still, chaos loves confidence. And sometimes, lip-sync history gets made because you needed something to do with your hands.

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❤️ Winston Howes didn’t want a statue of his wife, he wanted something alive

A quiet English farmer turned grief into an eternal love letter big enough to be seen from the heavens.

After Janet Howes died unexpectedly at 50, her husband Winston didn’t speak much about the loss. He just started planting. Quietly. Day after day. Until over 6,000 oak saplings had filled a six-acre field on their farm in South Gloucestershire.

No one knew what he was doing. Not until a man drifted overhead in a hot air balloon and looked down. From above, Winston’s plan came into view: a perfect heart carved into the countryside, its tip pointing to Janet’s childhood home.

Winston created the tribute in 1995, in the months after Janet’s death. Nearly thirty years later, the trees are still standing. The heart is still there. There’s a bench in the center now, where Winston sometimes goes to sit and think of Janet.

🟠 A brutal test of your vision and your vocabulary

You’ll need sharp eyes and all the right words to pass this color-vision test that 99% of us fail.

A UK eye care company created a deceptively simple quiz: sort slightly different shades of the same color in perfect spectrum order. No context. No clues. Just your eyeballs, squinting into the void. Of the first 2,000 people who tried it, only 1% scored a perfect ten.

Women, on average, did a bit better than men. People in their 30s topped the age rankings. And Cyprus? Total color vision MVPs, with the highest national average. (The U.S. placed a respectable third!)

But performance on the test doesn’t just come down to sharp eyesight. It’s even shaped by the language you speak.

That’s because color isn’t just seen. It’s named. And for a long time, humans didn’t have all the words. “Orange,” for instance, didn’t enter the English language until the 1500s. Before that, people simply called it “yellow-red.” The fruit actually gave the color its name, not the other way around.

Some languages didn’t even have names for certain colors at all. The ancient Greeks, for example, had no word for blue. In The Odyssey, Homer famously described the sea as “wine-dark.” And in many unwritten languages, color is still described more by comparison than abstraction — something might be “leaf-colored” or “like blood,” rather than green or red. I don’t know what’s up with “heliotrope”.

So if you flunk the test, you’re in good company. And if you’re a woman in Cyprus in your thirties, don’t let the pressure get to you!

💬From the friends group text…

“If you’re a perfectionist, this is probably NSFW.” She warns you right at the top of the video! Woof. This bit of gift wrapping is giving me the vapors! Not just the stripes, but the colors too?!? My word! The alignment… the symmetry… the glory!