Wordy Wednesday: Incarnadine

I ran across this article the other day about an albino bottlenose dolphin in Lake Calcasieu, Louisiana. The rest of the members of it's pod are normal colored. He's being dubbed Pinky. Yeah, that's original. I think that 'Incarnadine' would be more befitting. I mean, let's get a little more creative here. Case in point, Blue's Clues, she's named Blue, wow that's a shocker. It is a little deeper meaning seeing as how she's a hound, 'Ol Blue, but still, wouldn't Azure have been a bit more educational? I mean, she has a pinkish friend named Magenta. Kids will pick up on anything. You teach them about squares, circles & dodecahedrons, they'll find those tricky dodecahedrons! But I digress, all in favor of Incarnadine, the albino bottle-nose dolphin, raise their hand.

incarnadine • \in-KAHR-nuh-dyne\• adjective

1 : having the pinkish color of flesh

*2 : red; especially : bloodred

Example Sentence:

"Tavel [wine] … is noted for its assertive fruit and magnificent rich and brilliant incarnadine color." (Vick Knight Jr., Press Enterprise [Riverside, CA], August 11, 1999)

Did you know?

"Carn-" is the Latin root for "flesh," and "incarnates" is Latin for "flesh-colored." English speakers picked up the "pinkish" sense of "incarnadine" back in the late 1500s. Since then, the adjective has come to refer to the dark red color of freshly cut, fleshy meat as well as to the pinkish color of the outer skin of some humans. The word can be used as a verb, too, meaning "to redden." Shakespeare used it that way in Macbeth: “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”


** word of the day thanks to merriam-webster online **