“Blueing the economy”, “yellowish revolution” and “greening the blue”: old and new colour idioms in an ENG>ITA perspective

The notion of idioms – either metaphorical or metonymic expressions – indicating colours is present in many cultures: it is associated with important socio-cultural information gathered over time by different ethnic groups (Arseneva, 2014). Colour has always been one of the categories of cognition of the world, which is as important as other categories, such as space, time, movement. Being one of the most ancient categories of the theory of knowledge and most often culture-bound phrases, colour idioms have acquired symbolic values. The aim of this paper is to try to give up-to-date answers to two conventional questions: what are the historical and cultural links between colours and related symbolic meanings? And are such links identical in all the geographical and linguistic contexts we observe? To provide such answers, this study will focus on colour idioms both in English and Italian and will study divergences and convergences of cultural symbolism from a linguistic point of view. After a brief theoretical outline of colour phraseology (Berlin and Kay, 1969; Falcinelli, 2017; Philip, 2011), the practical part of the paper will consist of an in-depth analysis of 3 basic colours – i.e., blue, yellow and green – their tones, their symbolic use in business brands and logos and their cultural symbol as well as figurative meaning in specific colour idioms; such lexical analysis, supported by a short description of their origins, will be accompanied by modern citations retrieved in popular online newspapers and magazines (such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist,) and news websites (such as BBC.com and CNN.com). The expected outcome of this investigation is to go beyond the already-known figurative meanings of this narrow range of colours and shades and to add novel and unpredictable symbolic usages.