Mind Your Language | 18 July 2009

‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window.

‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window. He’d learnt the fact from the former, though he might have noticed it in the latter. I’m not sure there has been a bad year for daisies in the past few centuries. In the late 1380s Chaucer wrote: ‘Of al the floures in the mede,/ Thanne love I most these floures white and rede,/ Suche as men called daysyes.’

Now, I have had some experience of daisies since the days that I used to make them into chains while waiting to bat at rounders, and I am well aware that they are yellow, not red. I mean the ordinary kind that some folk call Bellis perennis. Why did Chaucer call them red?

It must be part of the general shift around of colour names that happens without anyone intending it. The word yellow was available to Chaucer. In the Canterbury Tales he says: ‘This Pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex.’ But some things that we call yellow he called red. The same is true of Milton 300 years later. He was capable of calling a cowslip, quite correctly, yellow (in his song ‘On May Morning’). But the moment he gets to lightning it is red: ‘The thunder, wing’d with red lightning,’ we get in Paradise Lost.

If lightning was red until the early modern period, gold remained red longer. I know that some gold is reddish, but the Oxford English Dictionary defines yellow as ‘the colour of gold, butter, the yolk of an egg’ etc.