Kurt's not the only Cerulean Warbler

[wowbright]

verdandil tipped me off to this beautiful bird.



The photo was takenby MDF and used through a Creative Commons attribution-share alike license. I found it on Wikipedia.

When I saw this picture, I was a little concerned by how the color is almost azure, with only a hint of green - but I calmed down when I read Wikipedia's current definition of cerulean: "Cerulean, also spelled caerulean, may be applied to a range of colors from deep blue, sky-blue, bright blue or azure color through greenish blue colors." Not that Wikipedia is a complete authority on these matters, but I will trust it here because I just like the idea of cerulean being so versatile. Like my Kurt.

(I am just going to ignore buzzkill Merriam-Webster, which defines cerulean as "resembling the blue of the sky.")

Comments

And the OED says ...

[wowbright.livejournal.com]

So I just looked it up in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which says (I am paraphrasing a bit because of the abbreviations and my inability to type th International Phonetic Alphabet on LJ):

cerulean - [from Latin caeruleus sky-blue, sea-blue (or sea-green) from caelum sky, heaven] (Of) the colour of the cloudless sky, deep blue, azure.

So the root of the word, caelum, does not support me; but what it came to mean in caeruleus does. And yet, if the OED is describing the current English meaning correctly - well, I am bereft. I need green to be in there, dangit! Maybe I need to go to the full OED and see what it says.

Re: And the OED says ...

[verdandil.livejournal.com]

And I shall be in denial until further notice (I conceive cerulean as a rich, nuanced colour, thank you very much, so bye-bye OED).