Complex Numbers

Scarlet

Scarlet
an entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]

Unlike with most words, I have a vague memory of my first known encounter with this one. I know it was in a comic book, but (this is where the vague comes in) I can't remember if it referred to the color of Superman's cape, or they called The Flash by one of his nicknames, the Scarlet Speedster.

It would be many years before I was forced to read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as part of an AP English curriculum in high school, so never let it be said that we can't learn things from comic books.

The upshot of this is that, for me, the word and color "scarlet" would always be associated with heroism, and not, as turns out to be the case in our complicated psychological color map, sin. The shade of red associated with romantic love, e.g. on V-Day, is much darker (as is appropriate), and actual primary-color red mostly just has "stop!" and "expense!" connotations. Which also reminds me of romance.

The red used in comics, though, is red, not scarlet. There's a historical reason for this: the most common (probably cheapest) technology for printing in something other than monochrome was the four-color technique.   There's a lot of technical stuff at that link that's irrelevant right now, but you might recognize that the system is still in use. You might even have one in your home and/or office, comprised of a cheap-ass loss-leader printer, using four cartridges of ink that, ounce for ounce, is probably more expensive than gold.

Hence, Superman (or The Flash) was rendered, in comics and in the Sunday newspaper, mostly in bright primary and complementary colors: red, green, blue, magenta, cyan... even yellow, which doesn't always show up well against a white background.

Actual scarlet, which is on the red side of reddish-orange, was probably too subtle for the four-color process. But there, I'm just guessing. "Scarlet speedster" was likely used more for its alliteration than chromatic accuracy.

As I can't seem to do one of these entries without researching etymology, though, I did so, and discovered that, apparently, scarlet was a relatively early word adopted into English: it appears in Old English texts as far back as 1250 C.E.  , while the color itself stretches back into the first millennium B.C.E.

And, like I said above, it's often associated with sin, because of English translations of the Bible. But I reject that association and substitute my own.