Roses are Blue

Right now, roses can be grown in lots of different shades, including pink, yellow, peach, and even green. But blue roses can only be created artificially; one way is to fresh cut flowers and put their stems in blue-colored water. This is not permanent, and doesn’t create a true blue rose. —Karen Lurie —Roses are Blue  (Science Central)

In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, the gentleman caller remembers that his nickname for the wallflower Laura was “Blue Roses,” because that’s what he thought she said when she told him she had been absent on account of “pleurosis”. It’s a touching scene, especially because Jim only remembers it haltingly, while Laura recalls more details, as if it only happened yesterday for her.

Note that this article is a summary of scholarship published elsewhere. I wish more online journalists would credit their sources this way, though I recognize it’s not the responsibility of web designers and journalists to correct the sloppiness of students who mistake journalism for academic research. I also appreciate the caption beneath the image of the blue rose, that indicates the picture is fake… still, that caption isn’t a part of the image file itself, so this image might still be mistaken for a photo of the real thing.

On another note, I don’t like like the sound of the merged verb “to fresh cut”. Ah, well… every profession has specialized language. I remember my brother bursting out laughing when I told him about “deproblematize”. (Fortunately, I wasn’t acutally using the word at the time, I offered it as an example of jargon.)