The Day I found what 'P-U-C-E' meant

Till date, while reading books or mags, ‘Puce’ immediately conjured in my mind an image of a sickly shade of green. The word ‘p-u-c-e’ always reminded me of being sick and throwing up. Though for the life of me, I can’t figure our how I got such an word association in my mind (maybe from the similarity between ‘puke’ and ‘puce’).

Today, while going through my WordPress subscriptions, I came across this sentence -

The sick shade of Green I thought P-U-C-E meant

“Once upon a time, circa 1996, an awkward sixteen-year-old girl dressed in a puce, empire-waist…..” from 4 Mothers. Immediately the same old vision flashed in my mind – of a young girl wearing a sick shade of green – kind of like the green shown here.

And then I decided – “That is it. I need to find out what this puce looks like.” And this is what I discovered -

Puce (often misspelled as “puse”,”peuse” or “peuce”) is a color that is defined as ranging from reddish-brown to purplish-brown, with the latter being the more widely accepted definition found in reputable sources. Puce is a shade of red. [courtesy - Wikipedia]

puce  (pys)   n. A deep red to dark grayish purple.[courtesy - thefreedictionary.com]

And folks, I present to you, the colour PUCE -[I found this by filling in the colour co-ordinates from Wikipedia into MS Paint.]

Hmmmmm…That’s not disgusting at all. In fact, it looks downright delicious. I can now imagine a girl wearing a really pretty puce dress.

But I do wish they had thought of naming it anything other than P-U-C-E. Left to me, I would probably have christened it Flavian Pink. Don’t ask me why, it just looks like Flavian Pink to me.

***35 minutes after publishing this post  – WOW! I just googled ‘Flavian Pink’ and it seems I am the only person in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD to have thought of such a colour. Whoopeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!

Go on, try it. Type “Flavian Pink” (quotes and all) into Google and you will see what I mean.