Was watching kids tv this morning.

Not ‘good’ kids tv like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man, Johnny Bravo etc, but toddler tv, Blues Clues and the like.  On one of the shows they were teaching colours, and had drawn an orange (the fruit, not the colour), but had painted it blue.

It struck me how lucky it is that oranges (the fruit) actually are orange (the colour), it could get really confusing if oranges were actually some other colour.

This seemed to me at the time quite profound… but then it was 6 in the morning, and I had drunk an awful lot the night before.

Then I got to wondering, which came first, was the fruit named “orange” because some particularly unimaginative explorer discovered it and decided it was orange so should be called an orange.  Or had nobody thought to mix red and yellow paint until after the fruit had been discovered and therefore named the colour after the fruit?