bluer than blue (part 1)

Have you ever wondered why “blue” is oftentimes associated with sadness and depression? If we say “blue mood”, we mean bad mood.  And yet the color blue looks so cool and calming, blue also represents peace, tranquility, stability, harmony, unity, trust, and confidence. The color blue in our Philippine flag for instance represents peace, quite a contradiction eh!

I was feeling bluer than blue because of my uuuusual problem… Infact I just placed “forever blue” as my shout out in my YM referring to Jed Madela’s song, then one friend mentioned “bluer than blue” (bluer than blue, sadder than sad…a line from Michael Johnson’s song). This line only made me curious on the origin of the term. My google search lead me to the following explanations…

• First , according to the navy terminology (www.navy.mil)”If you are sad and describe yourself as “feeling blue,” you are using a phrase coined from a custom among many old deepwater sailing ships. If the ship lost the captain or any of the officers during its voyage, she would fly blue flags and have a blue band painted along her entire hull when returning to home port.” Losing a comrade at sea- yeah that’s pretty much of a downer and a ship bearing a blue flag and coming into port sounds pretty ominous too.
• Second (www.wikipedia.com), ”blue may refer to the feeling of sadness because blue was related to rain, or storms, and in Greek mythology, the god ZEUS would make rain when he was sad (crying), and a storm when he was angry“.
• Third, the “Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins” by William and Mary Morris says it’s believed this expression came from “…an abbreviation of ‘blue devils’ — hallucinations, like pink elephants, popularly believe to accompany delirium tremens…the term blue in the sense of melancholy, depressed or despondent has been an element of slang, especially black slang, since midway through the past century…”

There goes the explanations. satisfied? Im afraid I’m still not quite convinced with those explanations. There were probably more justifications other than those I mentioned above. One source explained that the phrase blue has been used to describe feelings of sadness or depression since the Elizabethan period with the first reference in the Oxford English Dictionary of this usage dating from 1550. However, the exact explanation to answer the questions why and how was not revealed.

Today is no different from the past days…a bigtime bummer! Damn! Im sounding more and more like a broken record… same problem, same person, same complains…and its totally annoying … now I understand how my confidants must have felt whenever I talk to them about the matter, I dont have to be in their shoes to know that, just hearing myself complain about the same thing makes me cringe from embarassment.

Perhaps it would be better for me to just keep my mouth shut…heeding one person’s advice…”if you have nothing to say, then say nothing”…in short “shyadap” . Perhaps it’s high time to just keep everything to myself…hah!

Vice President of United States Dick Cheney mentioned in one of his articles that when life gets pretty overwhelming (well, considering that he’s VP of the world’s most powerful nation), he always go to his undisclosed place. A place where he can spent quality time mulling over things. It helped to keep him sane when things just gets tough. Having an undisclosed location probably is a solution whenever we feel so down. We gotta spent time to think things over,away from all the stressors…

gotta go now…til next time.

(original date: July 11, 2008)