#Twenty Colours For Monochromatics

You can see the world just how you want to see it in living colour...and here are 20 hues, shades, tints, and pigments that will grab the attention of everyone's eyes except for those of you who are colour blind. Whether this series of posts will inspire you in any way is sort of gray area. Proceed with caution. We of the Truly Useless Group usually do.

• Amaranth [E32636] is a reddish-rose color that is a representation of the color of the flower of the amaranth plant. The flowers of the 'Hopi Red Dye' amaranth were used by the Hopi (a tribe in the western United States) as the source of a deep red dye. Also a synthetic dye was named "amaranth" for its similarity in color to the natural amaranth pigments known as betalains.
• Bistre (or bister) [3D2B1F] is a very dark shade of grayish black; a shade of brown made from soot; the name for a color resembling the brownish pigment. Bistre's appearance is generally of a dark grayish brown, with a yellowish cast.
• Cerulean [007BA7] is a color with the hue ranging roughly between blue and cyan, possibly derived from the Latin word caeruleus, "dark blue, blue or blue-green", which in turn probably derives from caelulum, diminutive of caelum, "heaven, sky."
• Davy's Gray [555555] is a dark gray color, made from powdered slate, iron oxide and carbon black named for Henry Davy. Ah - who is Henry Davy, right?
• Ecru [C2B280] is a greyish-pale yellow or a light greyish-yellowish brown (perhaps even a yellowish-palish brown grey) often used to describe fabrics. The word has French origins, specifically the French word écru, which means literally ‘raw’ or ‘unbleached’. Pale-brownish yellow-lightish brown? No? Also, it is not featured prominently in northeastern Mississippi.
• Falu (or falun) red [801818] is the name of a Swedish deep red paint well-known for its use on wooden cottages and barns. The paint originated from the copper mine at Falun in Dalarna, Sweden. The traditional color remains popular today due to its effectiveness in preserving wood. In Finland, it is known as punamulta (“red earth”) after the pigment, very finely divided hematite. Why Lawrence Carmichael Earle comes to mind in composing this entry is beyond us.
• Gamboge [E49B0F] is a deep-saffron-to-mustard-yellow pigment best known as the color used to dye Buddhist monks' robes. Gamboge is most often extracted by tapping resin from various species of evergreen trees. The pigment's name stems from gambogium, the Latin word for the pigment, which derives from Gambogia, the Latin word for Cambodia.
• Harlequin [3FFF00] is a color described as being located between green and yellow (closer to green than to yellow) on the color wheel and was supposedly first used as a colour name in 1923. We’ll just see how many people celebrate that centenary.
• Indigo [4B0082] is a color traditionally regarded as being on the visible spectrum as well as being one of the seven colors of the rainbow (between blue and violet). However it's also one of a few colors that gets its name from an object in the natural world - like orange, rose, and violet.
• Jazzberry Jam [A50B5E] is a shade of red-violet that was formulated by Crayola crayons in 2003. Which seemingly means someone is still inventing new colors. When will Crayola identify those colours out of space? Anyway, Razzberry Jazzberry Jam was also the name of a Canadian animated children's television program about music.
• Khaki [C3B091] is a light shade of yellow-brown whose name is a loanword incorporated from Hindustani (meaning "soil-colored") and was originally derived from the Persian (literally meaning "soil"), which came to English from British India via the British Indian Army. Hey - a word immigrant! So tThe trousers known as "khakis", which became popular following World War II, were initially military-issue khaki-colored chino cloth twill, used in uniforms and invariably khaki in color. And "Khaki University" is not a derogatory term for a fraternity.  Tell your friends!
• Liberty [545AA7] is a shade of blue, first recorded as a color name in English in 1918. Two questions: 1) what prompted this as a name in 1918, and 2) would Patrick Henry have really wanted this?
• Mikado Yellow [FFC40C] is a shade of yellow, which is just yellow enough to make it one of the official colors of Oberlin College. Oddly enough it was once a color used for Lincoln automobiles, too, which means one can only assume there was beauty in the yellow of the beast. Consider that, Pooh-bah!
• Navajo White [FFDEAD] is a color - no, really - that is sort of orangish-white or peachy-orange...or whitish orange? Pastel yellow?  Whatever you call it, its name stems from its similarity to the background color of the Navajo Nation flag. As such the name is is usually only used when referring to paint (the color!). As the name indicates, the color is often considered a shade of white, even though it is more properly categorized as a yellow.
• Portland Orange [FF5A36] is a color that does but one thing: it tells you not to walk. Yes, this color is that of the lights that spell out DON'T WALK in pedestrian crossing signals in the United States and in some parts of Canada (not shown in Quebec). They - and indeed, the rest of the world - prefer red. How bland. Oh, we're looking in to the color of the WALK portion of the direction. We'll be in touch.
• Rhythm [777696] is a color, it's a shade companion, but can you see it everywhere? No, really it's a shade of blue-gray - which only makes sense because one would expect rhythm to be with blues. Not that the proponents of the blue shade are more zealous than the gray shade, mind you. Not at all. But Rhythm was first formulated in 2004. Another new color!
• Thistle [D8BFD8] is a pale purplish color resembling the thistle plant, first recorded as a color name in English was in 1892. Also coming from England on October 31, 1892, was the first collection of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Bet! Anyway, the color thistle is associated with Scotland because the thistle is its national flower. Scotland's highest state decoration is the Order of the Thistle.
• Verdigris [43B3AE] is the common name for a green pigment obtained through the application of acetic acid to copper plates or the natural patina formed when copper, brass, or bronze is weathered and exposed to air or seawater over a period of time. This then is the official colour of the Statue of Liberty. The name comes from the Middle English vertegrez, an alteration of vert-de-Grèce ("green of Greece"). The modern French spelling of this word is vert-de-gris ("green of grey").
• They call it Xanadu [738678] and, now, open your eyes and see how the color that was made is real. No, it's really a gray-green-blue color.