A book in progress by Nigel P. Daly and Peter M. Daly
Humans all share certain universal schemas of experience, such as space, time and colour, but not all languages code these schemas in the same way.
The Mexican language Tzeltal represents spatial relations as absolute (e.g., North-South-East-West) regardless of context, whereas English spatial relations can be absolute or relative (e.g., left-right) depending on context (Levinson, 2003); Chinese conceptualizes time as either horizontal (before-after) or vertical (up-down), whereas English conceives of time on a horizontal axis.
And much research has shown that colours can act as schemas, and that these schemas can vary greatly from one culture to the next. Although humans around the globe share the same sensory-neurological apparatus that allows us to perceive the same colour wavelengths, their manifold representations and associations in language, at times incongruous and even contradictory between—and within—different languages, speaks to how important colours are to navigate not only the physical world but also the symbolic worlds that emerge within different cultures.
The colours of linguistic relativism
For thousands of years, there has been philosophical debate about whether language filters our perception of reality.
Sophists in Ancient Greece like Gorgias seemed to believe that people perceive objects differently and that objective reality is distorted by language (Consigny, 2001:42-43); Kant viewed language as a pre-condition for concepts (Bennett, 1966:84) and one of the tools that helps the intellect experience
reality; and for von Humboldt in the early 19th Century, language was seen as expressing the spirit or “worldview” of a nation or culture (Trabant, 2000). Since that time, a re-occurring question in the humanities and social sciences that periodically arises—at times fashionable and other times not—is whether language determines thought, and if it does, then do different cultures not only speak differently, but also think differently?
In the modern scholarship of the 20th and 21st Centuries, the pendulum of linguistic relativism has sliced
through a wide range of fields, including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy.
In the early to mid-20th Century, the debate was dominated by relativist positions from anthropology and
ethno-linguistics that prioritized the “meaning” side of languages (plural) insofar as it acts like a window into a culture (Boas, 1911; Sapir, 1929; Whorf, 1956). This position has become popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
This view was superseded in the 1960s to 1990s by Chomsky’s (1965) massively influential bio-linguistic argument for “universal grammar” that stripped language of its semantic and cultural associations to
focus exclusively on its universally shared “form” (i.e., syntax). Here, language is treated as a singular object. Berlin and Kay (1969) aligned with the universalists with a ground-breaking study providing empirical evidence to show that colour terms in different languages derived from a universal biological
and perceptual substrate.
However, echoes of the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” re-emerged again after the late 1980s with influential figures like cognitive linguist Lakoff (1987) who demonstrated that cultural metaphors in languages of
different cultures represent different thought patterns. Similarly, by the late 1990s, Saunders (1995) and Lucy (1997) challenged the research methods and universalist assumptions undergirding Berlin and Kay’s influential colour research.
The issue clearly is not so … black and white.
White: Universalism and colour perception and terms
On the universalist side of the debate, the aim has been to show that colour perception and the development of colour terms in all languages have absolute universal constraints based on human physiology. In an analysis of 20 languages from different language families, Berlin and Kay (1969) identified a possible 11 basic colour terms across cultures with the first six tending to share an evolutionary sequence of entering language:
· white and black being the original colour terms, and then
· red, green, yellow and blue later entering many human languages in more or less this order (Berlin and Kay, 1969; Kay and Maffi, 1999; Kay, 2015).
Though there have been numerous criticisms of this theory (e.g., Moss, 1989; Saunders, 1995; Lucy, 1997), there has also been debate as to why colour terms enter human languages in the order that they do. The proposed arguments explaining this cross-cultural similarity in colour categories have been regarded as either human neuro-physiological responses to light wavelengths (Kay and McDaniel, 1978), or universal human experiences of common phenomena such as day, night, fire, and sky (Wierzbicka, 1990).
Black: Seeming Relativism and colour symbolism
Linguistic relativists refuse to objectify language and do not exclusively focus on language as form. Instead, they focus on how language affects speakers’ worldview and thinking, including how perceptions
like colours are cognitively processed. To understand “worldview” as it relates to colour perception and cognition, it is instructive to look through the lens of culture and historical development.
A historical understanding of the evolution of colour terms and associations in human language cannot be divorced from material culture and the human production of colour pigments and coloured artefacts.
Although the Homo genus hominoids for hundreds of millennia have been born with essentially the same sensory and neurological systems to differentiate colours, archaeological evidence shows that earth
pigments were first deliberately produced and employed for communicative purposes over 500,000 years ago (Watts, 2015). However, from approximately 100,000 years ago, earthen pigments and colours were employed in burials, engravings, and beads, playing instrumental role in the development of “symbolic material culture” (Watts, 2015; d’Errico and Stringer, 2011). This association of colours with symbolic contexts suggests that colour symbolism has been evolving for at least 100,000 years in different cultures across the world.
Emerging in a wide range of cultures, each shaped by unique geographical, ritual and societal features, the symbolic associations of colour with religious and folklore traditions have proliferated both among
(cf. Crozier, 1996) and within cultures (cf. Hutchings, 2015). At an English wedding, for example, the bride tends to wear white, at a traditional Chinese wedding she wears red (Figure I-1). At a European funeral black clothing, veils, ties, and armbands tend be worn, whereas at a traditional Chinese funeral, white vestments are traditionally worn by close family members. However, cultures are not monolithic and different colour connotations will be activated or repressed given the specific context. A bride at a modern wedding banquet in an ethnically Chinese context will typically wear a variety of wedding dresses at different stages of the banquet, and when she wears a white “western” gown (Figure I-1), nobody
present will think of funerals.
Figure I-1. Traditional wedding dresses. From left to right: Caucasian bride in White (Iriser, 2018), and Chinese brides in red (Kelidimari, 2011) and white (Sfetfedyhghj, Pixabay, n.d.).
Grey: Neither relativism, nor universalism
Increasing evidence from the field of neuroscience appears to be finally laying to rest the universalist/relativist debate.
It seems that Whorf was only “half right” insofar as “language affects color perception primarily in the right visual field via activation of language regions of the left hemisphere”, which means that “color naming reflect both universal and local determinants” (Regier and Kay, 2009). Further research reinforcing the intimate relationship between perception and language comes from patients with brain damage. Studies like Siuda-Kryzwicka and Bartolomeo (2019) show that that high-level cognitive processing of colours depends on at least three modules: colour experience, colour naming, and colour knowledge.
And since knowledge involves memory and culture-based experiences, there have been several researchers investigating how colours are associated in different cultures. Tham et al. (2019), for example, found that when prompted with colours, their Chinese- and English-speaking subjects shared a number of conceptual associations with colours, such as purity for white and water/sky for blue, but did not share others, such as for red which is related to enthusiasm in Mandarin and attraction in English.
Though cross-cultural psychological studies on colour associations have shown both similarities and differences of colour associations to abstract colour prompts, the authentic experience of colours cannot be dissociated from the context and the “coloured” objects within this context. Several studies and theories on colour preferences have therefore recognized the importance of context. Elliot and Maier’s (2012) colour-in-context theory, for example, maintains that the physical and psychological context influences the meaning of colours, and Taylor and Franklin (2012) suggest that colour preferences derive from people’s combined preferences and dispreferences of all associated objects, which could often be evolutionarily hard-wired to confer survival advantages (Palmer and Schloss, 2010).
In this way, colour preferences and affective responses depend largely on the objects of colour, not the colours in themselves. Palmer and Schloss’s (2010) Ecological Valence Theory (EVT) maintains that colour preferences (i.e., valences) emerge from the objects in one’s “ecology” or environment and may be genetically hard-wired in humans to confer evolutionary survival advantages, which helps to explain why a number of studies have shown that people of several cultures tend to prefer blue (clear skies and clean water) than greenish-yellow (dirty water, bile, rotten-food) (Choungourian, 1968; Eysenck, 1941; Fushikida et al., 2009; Hurlbert and Ling, 2007; Saito, 1996).
However, many of the studies mentioned in the previous paragraph had a universalist mandate and covered a surprisingly small range of industrialized countries. Taylor et al. (2013) pointed this out in their study of the African Himba people who demonstrate colour preferences are not universal and depend on reasons that are “fluid and diverse”. For these reasons, they show support for Ecological Valence Theory (EVT) that is more open to ecological and non-universal influences because it identifies four main ecological factors that determine people’s liking and disliking of colours as related to the objects’:
1. importance in one’s life,
2. perceptual salience,
3. frequency with which they are experienced, and
4. strength of the affective response they cause (Palmer and Schloss, 2010).
These ecological factors can account for both individual and cultural variations in colour preferences. That is, individuals grow up in environments populated with objects and develop personal preferences for colours and objects; but these individuals in turn live in cultures that over thousands of years accumulate different practices, stories, and symbolic values associated with coloured objects, and these form a significant part of the individual’s colour knowledge that is activated in contextualized experiences where colours are either physically or linguistically presented. In this way, a red envelop can thus cue very different expectations in English and Chinese cultures: one might expect to find a Valentine’s Day card in the former, but a gift of money in the latter.
- Figure I-2. A Valentine’s Day red envelope and money gift red envelope.
The aim of this book is to provide a qualitative exposition of what was above referred to as colour knowledge, in the three major world languages. While there have been studies on metaphorical associations of colours in English (Allan, 2009; Barchard et al., 2016; Hutchings, 2015; Trim, 2011; Watts, 2015), in Mandarin (He, 2011; Huang, 2011; Tao, 1996; van Ess, 2001; Xing, 2009; Yau, 1994), and comparing English and Mandarin (He, 2011; Wang, 2012; Wang, 2015), these have come from disciplines ranging from anthropology, literary studies, history, aesthetics, psychology. Till now, there have been no systematic and categorized comparisons of the figurative language of the six primary colours in two, let alone, three major world languages.
This study categorizes the semantic meanings and uses of the six primary colour terms (white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue) across the two Germanic languages of English and German and Chinese, which belongs to a different language family. (When specific Chinese words are romanised, Mandarin pinyin and the word “Mandarin” will be used as it is the official Chinese dialect of China.) This comparison of the figurative uses of colour terms highlights shared basic prototypical meanings across the three languages, and then continues to semantically organize the extended meanings in terms of positive, negative and then neutral connotations.
In this way, we hope that this book can serve as a resource of colour associations and extended meanings to complement psychology research strands that have investigated basic colour terms (Berlin and Kay, 1969; Kay and Maffi, 1999; Kay, 2015), colour preferences (Fushikida et al., 2009; Hurlbert and Ling, 2007; Saito, 1996; Taylor and Franklin, 2012), as well as broad semantic associations with abstract colours (Mohammad, 2011; Siuda-Kryzwicka and Bartolomeo, 2019; Tham et al., 2019) and focused responses to certain colours in specific contexts (Elliot and Maier, 2012; Palmer and Schloss, 2010).
More broadly, we also hope that this investigation will be of interest to anyone who has a passion and curiosity about languages and cultures.
Levels of colour meanings: from prototypical to extended meanings
When discussing colours and their significations, it is useful to distinguish three levels of meaning for colour terms:
1. original or prototypical meaning, then
2. extended meaning, and finally
3. abstract meaning.
At the level of original, or prototypical, meaning, a colour term, say white, refers to the actual colour white. As mentioned above, perceptions and recognition of basic colours seems to be universal, so it would be clear that Snow White’s name came from her snowy white skin.
Figure I-3. Snow White with her snow white skin (created with Leonardo.ai).
From the prototypical, “white” starts to accumulate meanings or senses, such as to “whitewash” something, which means to cover something over with metaphorical “white” paint. These extended meanings may be created by means of metaphor, metonymy or other cognitive processes. For example, the extended meaning, or semantic extension, for white in English and German has accrued over the millennia the meaning of clean and pure. Subsequent, more abstract levels of meaning may then emerge from the extended one, such as the traditional Western Christian association of “virginity” with a white wedding dress. This is not to deny the influence of fashion, custom and individual preference, in both intra- and inter-cultural contexts, that override certain cultural associations with virginity.
In itself, colour is an optical experience and neurological construction, and while we customarily identify colours with objects, they are not a property of objects. The colour spectrum is very broad, but the names that languages give to the primary colour categories of red, yellow, green and blue are often the same (Berlin and Kay, 1969; Kay, 2015; Kay and Maffi, 1999).
Figure I-4. The colour spectrum (Fulvio314, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Still, words in a given language do not always name the same part of the colour spectrum, and even words within a language can simultaneously designate different areas of the colour spectrum depending on usage conventions. Added to this ambiguity is the evolutionary nature of language, which changes over time. Modern Chinese, for example, distinguishes green and blue with lü (綠) and lan (藍), but classical Chinese has a more fluid term qing (青) that can refer to green or blue; this ambiguity is still attested in words still used in modern Chinese (Mandarin) such as green leafy vegetable (qing-cai 青菜) and blue (cloudless) sky (qing-tian 青天) (Figure I5).
Figure I-5. An image of leafy green vegetables (qing-cai 青菜) under a clear blue sky (qing-tian 青天).
Furthermore, words can also change over time. Although the names of the primary colours tend to remain constant in a given language, the names of mixed colours may change, and come into and out of fashion, such as the imaginative and poetic names that some paint, cosmetics, and even gaming companies and designers give to their colours.
Perhaps even less constant are the more abstract or symbolic notions associated with colours in different languages that are subject to the tides of time. In Chinese, yellow (huang-se 黃色) has accumulated different meanings over time, having both the positive association as an imperial colour and the more modern negative association with pornography.
In modern German, yellow is still the colour of envy (gelb vor Neid; as per German writing convention, we will capitalize all German nouns), but in modern English it is green (“green with envy”). However, in the early modern period in England envy was also coded with yellow, or a colour closer to yellow than green. Shakespeare uses yellow for jealousy in The Winter’s Tale, and he also has Beatrice say of Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing that Claudio is
“… civil as an orange and
Something of that jealous complexion.” (II. i. 270-271)
The note in the Arden edition (2006) observes that “civil” can be a pun on Seville, which was also renowned for its bitter sweet oranges. The note also states that “yellow was considered a symbol of jealousy and suspicion.” The Arden edition further suggests that “Seville oranges also have a greenish tint, which makes them an apt emblem of the green-eyed monster”, used by Shakespeare in Othello, when Iago says:
“O! beware my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” (Othello III:iii)
However, the “green-eyed” reference more likely alludes to cats who often tease their prey. We would suggest that oranges contain yellow rather than green fruit flesh inside the outer rind, irrespective of the rind’s colour. For further discussion of Shakespeare’s use of the symbolic meaning of yellow, unequivocally associated with jealousy, see our discussion in the Yellow chapter (5) below.
Nonetheless, there is often a surprising degree of correspondence between ideas associated with certain colours in related languages, and at times even in unrelated languages. We shall concentrate on English and German, which are related languages, and Chinese, which is not related to either linguistically, but may at times demonstrate a certain similarity. For primary colour categories, the more prototypical the meaning, the more universal it tends to be.
As meanings deviate from the prototypical, they become more extended and abstract due to cultural influences. These influences may even be cross-cultural when different languages come in contact, such as the influence of English as an international language whose use of “white collar” worker has entered into many languages like Chinese, bai-ling (白領). But even for primary colours there may be more than one primary referent and therefore more than one prototypical association, such as for red, which may be associated with either fire, danger or blood unless fire and blood can be regarded as aspects of danger. Depending on the communicative context, which is usually self-sufficient and fairly well-delineated for the interculturally competent language user, the appropriate meaning is rarely misconstrued.
Still, it is not difficult to imagine cases of miscommunication [A1] that are either ambiguous (possibly priming more than one prototypical association or extended meaning) or that involve persons of a different cultures, who may be primed differently to receive different meanings. More than one instance of colour symbolism will demonstrate one or more totally different basic uses beyond the prototypical in one or more cultures. What is the Mandarin speaker to make of this joke: “Green was envious of Blue. It wanted to be the sky too!” Or, what is the non-Mandarin speaker to make of the humour in this image (if you don’t know, you will find out in chapter 4 about Green).
Figure I-6. A Chinese man not wanting to buy a green hat (created with MS Copilot).
Organisation of the book
Research shows that different languages tend to prefer certain colours over others. Yakovleva et al. (2015) analysed several dictionaries for colour terms and found the most frequent colours in English black (23%), blue (19%), white (16%), red (16%), green (10%) and yellow (6%), ands in German black (21%), green (20%), blue (19%), white (13%), red (10%), grey (9%), yellow (3%). In contrast, Xing (2009) revealed that the most frequently used colour terms in Mandarin are white, red, black, yellow, green, purple and blue.
Table I-1. Comparing the most frequently used colours in English, German, and Mandarin.
|
Language |
Most frequently used colours |
|
English |
black, blue, white, red, green, yellow |
|
German |
black, green, blue, white, red, grey, yellow |
|
Mandarin |
white, red, black, yellow, green, purple, blue |
Given the differences in the frequencies of these colours across the three languages, we will describe (somewhat arbitrarily) Berlin and Kay’s (1969; also Kay and Maffi, 1999) six most basic colours in their proposed evolutionary sequence: white, black, red, green, yellow and finally blue. Colour terms and symbolisms will be compared in two related languages, English and German, and compared with Chinese, as a major unrelated language. These figurative usages of colour have been culled from dictionary entries, research on colour terminology, and the authors’ own backgrounds in Sinology, Applied Linguistics, German Studies, and European Emblem Studies.
In each colour section, we shall begin with the shared meanings, if any, of the colour across these three major languages, and then proceed to categorize the different extended and abstract symbolic meanings from positive to negative and then to neutral connotations. Before proceeding on to these six primary colours, we will first discuss the how the Chinese language differs from Indo-European languages and then the concept of “colour” in the three languages.
Chinese correlational thinking and colour codings
It may be important at this point to note how Mandarin differs from the two Germanic languages of English and German. Linguistically, Chinese language family members like Mandarin and Cantonese are tonal languages and do not use word morphologies to indicate grammatical forms like verb tense and plural noun forms. Each word is also monosyllabic and there are many homophones in the language which is why compound words, tones and context are extremely important in decoding meaning. This also makes word differentiation a function of association, such as when a Chinese speaker tells another that her surname is Jiang (江), she will repeat the name in a compound such as Chang-Jiang (長江; the Yang-Tze River) to differentiate from other Jiang surname homophones (e.g., 姜, 蔣).
Although it is not our intent to put forward an argument for linguistic relativism, this kind of language correlationism is also clearly present in the history of Chinese philosophy and thinking, which suggests that language and thinking are at least to some extent mutually informing. At the level of thinking, numerous psychology studies have also demonstrated the Chinese cognitive tendencies toward relationality and interdependence, indirectness, and contextual holism, in contrast to Anglo-European preferences for independence, directness, and the separation and abstraction of form and content/context (see Nisbett [2003] for overviews of several relevant psychology studies).
In the linguistic context of Chinese culture and history, colours have been an important way to make sense of the world and our place in it. Categories like colours can relate and order seemingly unrelated phenomena from the natural (e.g., seasons, animals) to the social (e.g., political regimes) to the personal (e.g., fortune telling, illnesses). In addition to yin-yang thinking (陰陽), the five phases or elements (wu-xing 五行: earth, metal, wood, water, and fire) form a system of relationality that correlate phenomena and their inter-relationships, akin to Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy with its four elements of fire, earth, air, and water (cf. Wang, 2006: ch.3).
For over 2200 years, the Chinese cosmology of yin-yang and five phases have pointed to a way of both interpreting and harmonizing the disordered and chaotic human realm with the patterns of heaven, or nature (Schwartz, 1985: ch.9). This system of correspondence is tabulated in Table 2, which shows that metal was associated with the colour white, fire with red, wood with green, soil with yellow, and water with black.
Table I-2. Chinese Five Phases correlations from the Lü Spring and Autumn Annals (ca. 240 BCE) (Graham, 1989:341)
|
Five Phases
|
Colours |
Directions |
Seasons |
Creatures |
Music Notes |
|
Wood 木 |
Blue-Green |
East |
Spring |
Scaly |
Jue |
|
Fire 火 |
Red |
South |
Summer |
Feathered |
Zhi |
|
Soil 土 |
Yellow |
Centre |
– |
Naked |
Gong |
|
Metal 金 |
White |
West |
Autumn |
Furred |
Shang |
|
Water 水 |
Black |
North |
Winter |
Shelled |
Yu |
The First Emperor of China (Qin Shi-huang) ruled in accordance with one type of cycle of these phases, the conquest cycle. After he defeated neighbouring kingdoms and reunified China in 221 BCE, he was persuaded by soothsayers and counsellors following Tso Yen’s influential theory of cosmology which understood human history as following the five phases, with the Qin Dynasty being marked as the water phase, which corresponded to the colour black. Black was therefore adopted as the Emperor’s emblematic colour in ceremonial decorations, attire and banners (Schwartz, 1985:363). In line with the conquest cycle (or “overcoming interaction” in Figure I-7), the previous dynasty was historically represented by the metal (white) phase, which is overcome by water (black).
Figure I-7. Five phases cycle (Parnassus, 2013).
In more recent times, the increasingly internationalized and popular practice of Feng shui (literally “wind and water”, 風水), also more formally called geomancy or geomantic siting in English, takes the associations of phase and colour and maps them onto living spaces. In this Chinese system of thought, the design of house interiors and exteriors are believed to have the capacity to promote health and prosperity, for either the residents or companies located within that space. The use of colours inside your home can be an easy way to, in fashionable parlance, balance the energies of one’s space. An example from a popular book on feng shui associates red with fire, which is related to fame and reputation and spatially located in the northeast and southwest areas of a space; therefore, if you wish to enhance your fame and reputation, these areas of your house should contain red decorations or furniture (Johnson, 1998). The widespread uptake of Feng shui by so many Western non-Chinese people also indicates how easy it is to adopt ideas, beliefs and symbolisms outside one’s own culture in a process of validation and appreciation on an individual or subcultural level.
The terms “colour”, “Farbe” and “se” 色
Before considering individual colours, we should look at the connotations of the word “colour”. The word “colour” itself is telling in how it is used and perceived in different languages. In English, the connotations are often either positive or negative depending on context and collocation.
Success, usually under adverse conditions, is captured in the English phrase to “come through with flying colours.” The plural “colours” can indicate “flag”, as in the phrase “with flying colours,” but also more negatively in “sailing under false colours” (to pretend to be something one is not), and to “show one’s true colours” (when one’s perhaps unpleasant true personality is finally revealed). Mandarin also has the phrase true colours, or ben-se 本色, which literally means “root colour”. Similarly, in German Farbe (colour) often occurs in idiomatic phrases such as “Farbe bekennen” (to confess one’s colour) meaning to put one’s cards on the table, to confess or admit something. A person may also remain true to his or her colours (seinen Farben treu bleiben) and can also change sides (die Farbe wechseln). As in English, it is likely that some notion of flag often lies behind both the singular and plural of Farbe.
Figure I-8. A flag bearer “showing his colours” (created with DALL-E3).
In terms of personality, a “colourful personality” is varied and interesting, whereas a dull personality can be described as “colourless”. The word “colour” is usually associated with negative meanings, such as “off-colour” jokes, which are vulgar. A person’s prejudices may also “colour” his or her views. And when a person’s face becomes pale, it is “drained of colour” as a result of fear, pain or surprise.
In contrast to “colour” and “Farbe” which can carry connotations of inner or true self, the Mandarin word se (colour; 色) often refers to one’s outer surface, i.e., skin or face.
The compound fu-se 膚色 literally means skin colour and thus indicates complexion. More metaphorically, lian-se 脸色 means face colour denoting facial expression and emotion, and is often used in negative phrases, such as when someone is in a foul mood, the person’s lian-se hen nan kan (脸色很難看), which means the facial expression is ugly or unpleasant to look at.
Another association of se with feeling is the designation of lust. The word for “erotic” in Mandarin is se-qing 色情, which literally means “colour feelings,” and possibly relates metonymically with the practice of women colouring their faces with makeup, which stirs men’s feelings of desire for the opposite sex (van Ess, 2001:71). Other terms with a similar meaning include hao se 好色 (literally “loving colour”) for lust-filled, which describes the character of a se-lang 色狼, or “colour wolf,” a pervert.
Figure I-9. Image of a “colour wolf” (created with DALL-E3).
Interestingly, the idiomatic use of “colour” in both English and German tends to refer to more permanent or essential designations, such as personality or true self, whereas in Chinese idioms of colour often refer to outward manifestations of transient inner feelings. And while both English and Chinese also associate “colour” with base sexuality or vulgarity, in English the phrase “off-colour” suggests a deviation from the normal colour and is used to describes vulgar jokes or remarks, and in Chinese “colour” refers to lust or media-depicted graphic sex.
