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The only sphere of activity I can think of where blue is a colour (and so are yellow, green, brown, pink and black), but red is not a colour is the game of snooker.
I recently watched the World Snooker Championships on the TV and it suddenly struck me as strange to hear utterances like: He’s hit a red and not a colour. However, the game is home to some strange words anyhow, beginning with its own name. Apparently, this derives from obsolete British Army slang. A snooker was a beginner, an inexperienced soldier. Legend has it that British Army officers in Jabalpur in India around 1875 had the idea of adding coloured balls to a game called pyramid pool, which already had a white ball, a black ball and a pyramid of red balls. This new variation got its name, apparently, when, some years later, a player missed an easy shot and someone called him a snooker.
There was a sketch in a TV show in the eighties, where there was a colour outage and the reporter tried his best to describe it anyway – “now he’s going for the dark grey ball, probably hoping to get in a good position for the slightly lighter-grey one in the top right corner” &c. Then the colour came back, and the balls were actually all shades of grey.
Anyone know what show that might have been? I can’t think of it.
Sorry Lipman and John, I know this is not fair, but for heaven’s sake what happened with the driverless car?
I can’t believe that no one’s curious about it!
@Beatrice
Please see my comment on the relevant post.
@Lipman
I thought it might be “Not the Nine O’Clock News”, but Google doesn’t come up with anything, I’m afraid.