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ISBN: 9781620957097

CONTENTS

Preface

All the Colors of the Rainbow

Black, Black, Black Is the Color…

True Blue

Brown As A Berry

Gray Eminence

Green Pastures

Agent Orange

Tickled Pink with a Rosy Future

Born to the Purple

Seeing Red

White As Snow

Yellow Jack

PREFACE

Just as color adds a vital dimension to the visual world, so the idioms involving color have enhanced our language. Without them we would in effect be speaking in black and white, and we would be much the poorer for it.

The 750 or so terms in this book are arranged into twelve general categories: colors, black, blue, brown, gray, green, orange, pink (and rose), purple (and violet), red, white, and yellow. The order of these categories could have followed the order of the spectrum, or that of primary and secondary colors, or some other way. Instead, it is, except for the first, alphabetical. Within each chapter, the order is at best arbitrary.

Abbreviations are confined to one, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), for that masterpiece of etymology without which books like this could never be attempted. Citations from the Bible identify chapter and verse, and from plays, the act and scene, in the conventional fashion of 1:2, where 1 represents chapter (or act) and 2 is the verse (or scene). Cross-references are indicated in capital letters, for example, see BLACKAMOOR.

The author is deeply indebted to a long line of eminent etymologists, linguists, and lexicographers who collectively represent centuries of work in tracing the origins of the English language. This book is a modest compilation of the results of a fraction of their scholarship. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the many friends and acquaintances who have helped trace origins of elusive terms, track down song lyrics, and contribute arcane bits of information. Their assistance has greatly smoothed the way.

all the colors of the rainbow

A remarkable number of terms and phrases in our language refer to color. Some of them, such as feeling blue, seeing red, or tickled pink, associate colors with specific human emotions. Others, such as blue blood, white cockade, and red carpet, have honorable origins from the Middle Ages. And still others, among them yellow journalism, Red Guards, and Black and Tans, have an interesting although more recent history.

"Blue is true, Yellow's jealous,
Green's forsaken, Red's brazen,
White is love. And Black is death."

-- J. O. Halliwell, Nursery Rhymes of England (1842)

Practically every people and culture have used color symbolically, that is, assigned a variety of qualities and even specific objects to certain colors. According to Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, in Western art blue stands for constancy and truth; green for fruitfulness and hope; oragne for benevolence, earthly wisdom, and fire; purple for love of truth, loyalty, martyrdom, and royalty; red for blood, love, patriotism, and valor; white for day, innocence, perfection, and purity; yellow for divinity and the highest values; black for death, despair, and evil; brown for barrenness and penitence; and gray for barrenness, death, and despair. Further, some of these same colors also have negative associations: green with envy, orange with the devil, purple with mourning.

The Roman Catholic Church has long used a different set of symbols: blue for humility and expiation; black and violet for grief as well as death; green for God's bounty, gladness, and the Resurrection; light green for baptism; red for martyrdom; and so on.

Not everyone held to these conventions. Thus Charles Kingsley wrote, in Dartside (1849):

"Oh green is the colour of faith and truth,

And rose the colour of love and youth,

And brown of the fruitful clay."

Nor is such color symbolism confined to the West. To the Pueblo Indians each color meant a particular direction: white is east; yellow (or blue or black) west; blue (or yellow) south; etc. The precise assignment of color varied with each tribe. The Cherokee Indians, on the other hand, associated both directions and abstract qualities with color: red with east and success; blue, north and trouble; black, west and death; and white, south and happiness.

THE RAINBOW

"A flower de luse…hath all the colours of a Rainebowe."

--G. Legh, Accidence of Armoury (1562)

The rainbow is one of nature's most colorful phenomena. This arc of prismatic color, which today we know is caused by the refraction and reflection of the sun's rays in drops of rain, consists of the seven colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

The rainbow was a source of wonder to primitive and ancient peoples the world over. The ancient Greeks regarded it with dismay. In Homer's Iliad (c. 850 B.C.) Zeus, the god of gods, stretches forth a lurid rainbow to be a portent of evil. But the ancient Hebrews viewed it quite differently: "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth," God told Noah, assuring him there would not be another great flood (Genesis 9:13).

In myth the rainbow was the bow a sky deity used to fight against storm demons, as well as a bridge between heaven and earth. In folklore it was a symbol of the divine presence and therefore of hope, peace, resurrection, and victory. Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages likened its seven rays to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit--the fourfold nature of man's perfection (in body, mind, soul, and spirit) and the threefold nature of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost).

Not unreasonably the rainbow also has figured in weather forecasting. According to Leonard Digges, a rainbow in the morning was a sign that bad weather was coming, whereas a rainbow in the evening was a sign of good weather (Prognostication, c. 1555).

And of course rainbows have always appealed to poets, from Shakespeare, who said that adding another hue to the rainbow is "ridiculous excess," to the lyricists of such popular songs as "Over the Rainbow" (E. Y. Harburg, 1938) and "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" (Joseph McCarthy, 1918). The latter refers to the old myth that a pot of gold is buried under the place where a rainbow touches the earth. Reaching this spot is, of course, impossible, giving rise to the term rainbow chasers for those who pursue or hope for the impossible.

Clashing colors

"All colours will agree in the dark."

-- Francis Bacon, Essays(1625)

Certain colors are said to "go together," and others are said to "clash." Exactly which sets of colors do so is a matter of artistic convention, and even of fashion. "Where tawdry Yellow strove with dirty Red," wrote Alexander Pope (Moral Essays, 1735). Decades ago redheads were told never to wear pink, fashion decreeing that pink and red were an ill-suited combination. Today this dictum is frequently ignored, and pink and red are often seen in combination.

Colors more often clash in a figurative sense, in that they have long been used to differentiate opposing sides in competitions, ranging from warfare (see THE COLORS) to games and sports. Probably for this reason, many team names include a color: baseball's White Sox and Red Sox; football's Harvard Crimson and Yale Blue; crew's Oxford Blue and Cambridge Light Blue.

Black and white, which are considered colors even though they are not part of the spectrum, are similarly used to differentiate opposing sides. They operate in checkers and chess; in chess problems white always is "to move and win."

The color bar

"He's really awfully fond of colored people. Well, he says himself, he wouldn't have white servants."

-- Dorothy Parker, Arrangement in Black and White

Black and white also are used as racial descriptions, despite the fact that the so-called white race is actually closer to pink-skinned, and the so-called black is various shades of brown. An early instance appears in an account of 1400 that describes Numidians as being "blakk of colour."

The separation of black and white, and the regard of the one as inferior by the other, long antedates Dorothy Parker's acerbic description of racial prejudice. In the 19th century the word "colored" came to be considered more polite than "black" or "Negro." In the most famous abolitionist writing of the century, the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe writes, "Among the colored circles of New Orleans." And the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote, of Haitian patriot Toussaint L'Ouverture, "Dark Haytien! -- for the time shall come … when everywhere thy name shall be redeemed from color's infamy."

Long after the abolition of slavery in the United States, the color bar or color line separating black from white socially, economically, and politically survived. Although in 1878 the North American Review editorialized, "We shall soon cease to hear of a color-line," nearly a century later President John F. Kennedy still found it necessary to tell Congress, "There are no 'white' or 'colored' signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle" (message to Congress urging the passage of the civil rights bill of 1963).

In South Africa "colored" has long had a different meaning, that is, people of mixed race. In America today, "colored" is heard somewhat less, and those with skin other than "white" are now being described as people of color. However, one of the oldest organizations of its kind in America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, has retained its original name. See also under BLACKAMOOR in the next chapter.

COLOR BLINDNESS

"I suffer from an incurable disease -- color blindness."

-- Archbishop Joost de Blank

The statement above, attributed to this staunchly anti-apartheid South African clergyman, transfers this inborn physical disability to figurative blindness to racial differences. He was not the inventor of this figure of speech, which dates from the mid-19th century. But the disability itself was first described only about 1794, by scientist John Dalton.

Dalton, who himself was afflicted with it, called the inability to see certain colors or to discriminate between individual shades of color "Daltonism." It was renamed color blindness by Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), the inventor of the kaleidoscope, and first appeared in print in Diseases of the Eye (1854), an ophthalmology text.

Color blindness, which would be more appropriately called defective color vision, is thought to be very common. It rarely consists of total inability to distinguish colors, but more often is the tendency to confuse colors. When such confusion involves the colors red and green, used to indicate "stop" and "go" in traffic lights, it can be hazardous (this form is sometimes called red-green color blindness). Usually, however, color blindness is more inconvenient than disabling.

Changing color

"When Michael saw this host, he first grew pale,

As angels can; next, like Italian twilight,

He turn'd all colours…"

-- George Gordon Byron, The Vision of Judgment (1822)

To change color has meant to "to turn pale" since the late 13th century, and "to blush" since the mid-15th century. And eventually it acquired a third meaning, to regain one's color after turning pale.

In nature, changing color is a basic form of protection for some species, and indeed is referred to as protective coloring. Prime among them is the chameleon, a lizard that can change both its color and color pattern to make it blend with its surroundings and appear less conspicuous to its enemies. In humans, however, changing color has been identified with cowardice since 850 B.C., in Homer's Iliad. "The color of the brave man changeth not," he wrote, which was later quoted by Plutarch, and again, "The color of the coward changeth ever to another hue" (later quoted by Erasmus in his Adagia). It was still current in Shakespeare's time: "His coward lips did from their colour fly" (Julius Caesar, 1:2).

The Elizabethan age also saw another mode of changing color, the use of cosmetics. Thomas Dekker's poem, "A Description of a Lady by Her Lover" (c. 1632), has it:

"The reason why fond women love to buy Adulterate complexion: here 'tis read.

-- False colours last after the true be dead."

Changing colors can involve more than one kind of pretense. Indeed, under color of has meant under pretense or pretext since c. 1340, when Hampole's Psaleter had: "Vndire colour of goed counsaile bryngis til syn" (Under color of good counsel persuades [someone] to sin). This term, however, means something quite different from being under someone's colors(see THE COLORS below).

THE COLORS

A call to the colors, to standby one's colors, to be under someone's colors -- "colors" in these phrases all refer to an ensign or flag and, by extension, to the loyalty it commands. When Shakespeare described the exiled Duke of Norfolk's death in Richard II (4:1):

"And there at Venice gave … his pure soul unto his captain Christ, Under whose colours he had fought so long…"

he indicated that the Duke died in combat, while fighting for the Christian (Crusaders') side against the Turks and Saracens.

Today, to sail under false colodrs means to deceive by pretending to be something one is not, or by behaving hypocritically. The term comes from the pirates' common trick of hanging out a friendly nation's flag to lure a vessel close enough so as to attack and board it. The expression was used figuratively by the 16th century or so. Sir Thomas Elyot had a version of it in The Governour (1531): "He wyll…sette a false colour of lernyng on proper wittes, which wyll be wasshed away with one shoure of raine." And in 1711 Richard Steele wrote, in The Spectator, "Our Female Candidate … will no longer hang out false Colours." Obviously it was her views Steele was referring to, and not her makeup.

Someone sailing under false colors might well decide to come out in his/her true colors, that is, reveal their true character. This term is somewhat newer -- perhaps because true is less appealing than false. In any event, it dates only from the late 18th century. Dickens had it in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840): "[He] who didn't venture…to come out in his true colours."

The old term, to nail one's colors to the mast, also has a maritime origin. A flag nailed to the mast cannot easily be hauled down. Hence this became a metaphor for an unyielding position or attitude. Dickens so used it in Dombey and Son (1848): "Mrs. Chick had nailed her colours to the mast."

Still current is to come off with flying colors, meaning to win or succeed. It refers to the practice of a victorious fleet flying flags from the masthead as it sails into port, and has been used figuratively since the 17th century.

Colorful or colorless?

Whether true or false, some color appears to be preferable to no color at all. The adjective colorless has been used figuratively to mean dull, lacking a bright or distinctive character, from the mid-19th century. Writing about William Pitt, for example, Archibald Primrose (1847-1929) talked of "the colorless photography of a printed record" compared to a live speech. In contrast, colorful has meant lively, full of force, interest, or excitement, since the late 19th century, and much earlier than that color was figuratively equated with verve and brilliance. "To paint out that puisant Prince in such lively colours as hee deserveth," wrote Abraham Fleming (A Panoplie of Epistles, 1576).

Fleming's metaphor might be considered an early version of living colo, a term invented by some imaginative copywriter for the National Broadcasting Company and its parent, RCA, to advertise their wonderful commercial innovation, color television shows and sets that could receive them. The term color television first made its way into print in 1929 in a book that said, "Baird was partially successful in color television in 1928" (Sheldon and Grisewood, Television). The related term, colorcast, for color television broadcast, appeared in the linguistics journal American Speech in 1949.

A coat of many colors

Joseph is one of the most familiar figures from the Old Testament. He was the best-loved son of Rachel and Jacob, born to them in their old age, and consequently roused the jealousy of his older brothers. To show his fatherly love, Jacob "made him a coat of many colors" (Genesis 37:3). The Bible gives no further details about this garment except that it helped bring on misfortune, for, envious both of his position as a favorite and of his beautiful coat, his brothers sold Joseph into slavery. Eventually, of course, Joseph attained a position of power in Egypt, and during a subsequent famine he showed kindness to the brothers who had mistreated him.

Artistic color

Color has been vital to painters since prehistoric times. The ancient cave paintings that survive used all kinds of odd substances to make their mark on stone. Artists are, not unnaturally, fussy about the colors in their surroundings as well as in their work, and try to arrange them to their liking.

The term color scheme refers to any planned arrangement of colors to please the eye. It came into use about the turn of the 20th century and continues to be current, particularly among interior decorators and fashion designers. One of its early uses, however, was by a woman who was more of an "exterior" decorator, Britain's outstanding garden expert of her day, Gertrude Jekyll, who wrote the book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (1914).

Artists were the first to use the term local color, by which they meant realistic color, that is, the color natural to each object being painted. In the 19th century this term was transferred to literature and drama, to describe the portrayal of vivid, characteristic details and peculiarities of a particular time and place.

For very young would-be artists, that great American entrepreneur Walt Disney began marketing his Mickey Mouse Coloring Book in 1931. Although it was probably not the first coloring book -- that is, a collection of outline drawings which are to be colored in with crayons, pencils, or some other medium -- it did much to popularize this pastime. Schoolteachers sternly admonished those youngsters who failed to "color inside the lines," seen as evidence of sloppiness rather than a creative bent.

A related form of adult pastime is the color by number painting, an outline drawing that is numerically coded so the painter knows which color to fill in where.

Color coding today is used in a variety of enterprises, ranging from a method of indicating harmonies to be played on a guitar to marking electrical lead wires. It saves time and perhaps also eliminates error.

"The ravished coloratura trilling madly off-key."

-- W. H. Auden, Sea and MIrror (1944)

Coloratura is simply Italian for "coloring" or "colored." In the late 17th century it began to be used for vocal music that is ornamented with rapid runs, trills, cadenzas, and similar florid passagework. The OED cites the first reference in English to it in a 1740 translation of S. de Brossard's music dictionary, and it has been so used ever since, both for such music and for the kind of voice -- light, flexible, and usually soprano -- required to perform it.

A coloratura voice is distinguished from other kinds partly by its distinctive tone color, a term used to describe the particular quality of sound that differentiates the same note played on a flute or clarinet, for example, or sung by a soprano or contralto. Also called "timbre," tone color is determined by the particular harmonics sounded and their relative loudness. Combining different instruments, each with its own tone color, is an important consideration in musical composition, just as combining colors is important in the visual arts.

A horse of a different color

Exactly why a horse of a different color was originally selected to represent "another matter entirely" is no longer known. Some etymologists believe this saying was first suggested by Shakespeare, who in Twelfth Night (2:3) has, "My purpose is indeed a horse of that colour." The Bard, of course meant, "Yes, this is just what I intend," whereas the current locution is negative (this is different). More likely the modern term comes from the race course, where, perhaps, an unsuccessful bettor decided to try again and rationalized his new choice with this statement. In any event, the term has been used in the United States since the late 18th century and soon crossed the Atlantic to Britain. A correspondent of lexicographer Richard H. Thornton's told him that his grandfather, writing of James Polk's election to the Presidency in 1844, said, "They thought he would never win, but he proved a grey horse of a different color." (This election, incidentally, is believed to be the source of the expression "dark horse.")

Betting may also be the source of Let's see the color of your money, meaning, first prove that you can pay up before we go on. This slangy phrase is a 20th-century Americanism, according to Eric Partridge, and crossed the Atlantic unchanged. Another color term, however, may have quite different meanings, depending on where it is uttered. To be off-colour Britain means to be either ailing or a bit seedy. J. G. Holland used it thus in Sevenoaks (1875), "Everybody…considered her a little 'off colour.'" In America, on the other hand, it means of doubtful propriety or dubious taste, a meaning later adopted in Britain as well. An off-color joke, for example, is decidedly risqué, or, more baldly put, a dirty joke; it is not to be repeated in decorous company. The OED cites an early use of this sense in the National Police Gazette in l883, which refers to the "off-color morals" of the stage.

Black, black is the color, , ,

In a familiar American folk song composed by John Jacob Niles, black is the color of "my true love's hair," but that is one of the relatively few favorable references to this color. The majority of idioms and allusions equate black with sinister, malignant, or deadly. Thus black art is the art of the devil. To blackball or blackmail someone is a long way from doing him a favor, and black Monday or a black future are scarcely events to look forward to.

Literally, black means absorbing all light, without reflecting any of its rays. By extension it means the absence of light, or darkness. Yet long before the physics of light was understood, the word black was in common use. In Old English it was blaec, closely related to its equivalents in Old High German (blah, blach) and Old Norse (blakkr). And even older than that, in many languages and cultures, was the association of black with evil (and white with good). "For all the sin wherewith the Face of Man is blacken'd," wrote Edward Fitzgerald in his translation of Omar Khayyam, the 12th-century Persian poet.

Both in art and in religion black signified sin, despair, and mourning. Indeed, its use in mourning is very old indeed; it probably comes from the ancient Semitic custom of blackening the face with dirt or ashes to make it unrecognizable to the malignant dead, as well as a mark of grief and submission. (In China, on the other hand, white is the color of mourning.) At Roman funerals mutes wore black garments, a custom that long persisted, although later mutes were replaced by ordinary servants. Beaumont and Fletcher refer to it in their play, Monsieur Thomas (c. 1610):

"…give me leave to live a little longer. You stand about me like my Blacks."

Despite the color's many negative associations, in heraldry black, called sable, stands for the virtues of constancy, prudence, and wisdom. This may have been the rationale for calling England's Edward the Black Prince, but more of him later. And while black may be benign in heraldic devices, in flags and ensigns it is associated with deadliness and death.

Soon after light-skinned Europeans first laid eyes on Africans and other dark-skinned peoples, they called them "black." One of the first appearances of this terminology in print was in a travel book of 1625, describing "The mouth of the river, where dwell the Blackes, called Mandingos." In subsequent eras the words "colored" and "Negro" came to be considered less offensive, but about the middle of the 20th century there was a turnaround, and these terms were considered veiled insults by those who insisted that black is beautiful. Currently this view is changing again, and "black" is being displaced, at least in America, by "African-American" and "people of color." (See also under BLACKAMOOR below.)

as black as …

"Just then flew down a monstrous crow, As black as a tar-barrel;"

--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1872)

Proverbial similes involving the color black abound. As black as a crow or raven dates from Roman times. According to Roman legend, ravens originally were pure white until one day a raven complained to Apollo of the faithlessness of a nymph he loved. Apollo shot the nymph but punished the raven for squealing by changing its color to black. Joseph Addison's translation of Ovid has it,

"He blacked the raven o'er,

And bid him prate in his white plumes no more." Chaucer expanded on the simile to include coal ("As blak as any cole or crowe," The Knight's Tale), presumably more in the interests of meter than explication, whereas Shakespeare left it at crow ("Black as e'er was crow," The Winter's Tale, 4:4).

The four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in the famous nursery rhyme pie were definitely not crows (as in "eating crow"), for "when the pie was opened the birds began to sing," a talent conspicuously absent in crows. Yet in folklore blackbirds, like crows and ravens, are symbols of bad luck and evil. In 19th-century slang blackbirds were Negro or Polynesian captives on slave ships, and blackbirding meant kidnapping blacks for slavery.

The principal organic similes for blackness are the sloe, the small, sour, bluish-black fruit of the blackthorn, and the blackberry. They appear together in the 13th-century translation of the Roman de la Rose, thought to have been made by Chaucer: "Blak as bery, or any slo." Chaucer used "black as sloe" again in The Miller's Tale, but it has become less common in modern parlance. The blackberry, on the other hand, has appeared in another simile popular since Shakespeare wrote, "Give you a reason on compulsion! if reasons were as plentiful as blackberries I would give no man a reason upon compulsion" (King Henry IV, Part 1, 2:4). In England, at least, a blackberry harvest is reputedly huge. This fruit also gave rise to the term blackberry summer, the British equivalent of the North American Indian summer, that is, fine weather in late September and early October, when blackberries are ripe. And the tree that bears sloes gave rise to blackthorn winter, an unseasonable cold spell in late April and early May, when the blackthorn is blooming.

Of the inorganic substances appearing in simile, pitch is among the oldest. "Blacker than pitch" appears in Homer's Iliad (c. 850 B.C.), and black as pitch ccurs again and again in writings to the present day. A Chinese proverb in William Scarborough's 1875 compendium says "Black as pitch and ink," and indeed the latter comparison appears in English from the early 16th century until the 20th, when ink was no longer invariably black. Black as jet, soot, and ebony all are equally old. Older still is the aforementioned black as coal, which the OED cites as early as c. 1000. A Saxon manuscript predating the year 1000 has "Swa sweart swa col," and it may have been proverbial even then. Chaucer used this one again and again, and it remains current.

Long before people began to worry about pollution, coal also acquired the nickname black diamonds, alluding to its undisputed value as a fuel, and perhaps also referring to the two substances' common origin as a form of carbon. Ralph Waldo Emerson so referred to it in his essay on Wealth (1860):

"We may well call it black diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted."

Gourmets sometimes use "black diamonds" to mean truffles, considered at least as precious as these minerals and similarly found underground.

Yet another natural substance is black frost, as frost not accompanied by rime (white ice particles) has been called since the 14th century. It is similar but not quite identical to black ice, a term that came into use only in the 19th century and refers specifically to a coating of hard, very thin, transparent ice over a road surface. Because it cannot readily be seen, black ice is extremely dangerous to motorists and pedestrians, who, not realizing that a road is icy, do not proceed with the care they might use if they were aware of it. Oceanographers also use "black ice" to describe sea ice that is clear enough to show the water underneath it.

"Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole…"

-- William Ernest Henley, "Ínvictus" 1875)

In addition to similes alluding to animals, plants, and minerals, looser associations abound. Black as night seems a fairly obvious comparison. Black as hell, Hades, and the devil were common to the point of being clichés until the relatively recent past and hence were sometimes picturesquely embellished. In this vein were "blak as feend in helle" (Roman de la Rose, c. 1340), "black as the devil's hind foot" (T. C. Haliburton in Sam Slick's Wise Saws of 1843), and countless others. As seen above, William Ernest Henley avoided "hell" altogether, substituting "the Pit."

The rationale for black as thunder is puzzling unless it is interpreted as alluding to thunderclouds. Nevertheless William Makepeace Thackeray used it a number of times ("Black as thunder looked King Padella," in The Rose and the Ring of 1855 is but one instance), as did numerous later writers. Black as the ace of spades and black as a minister's coat, both 19th-century Americanisms, are obviously descriptive, but the contemporary American usage of black as your/my hat is less clear, since hats neither were nor are always black.

The black death

"White is love, and black is death."

--J. O. Halliwell, Nursery Rhymes of England(1842)

The Great Pestilence of 1348 and 1349, which ravaged Europe and killed approximately 12 percent of England's population, was what is now called bubonic plague. An acute and severe infection, bubonic plague is caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, which is transmitted from rodents to humans by the bite of an infected flea. Untreated, it causes death in about 60 percent of patients today and probably had a much higher mortality rate in the 14th century, when general health was much poorer. Death generally occurs within three to five days of infection.

The name Black Death