Complex Numbers

Carmine

Carmine
an entry for "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+]

I always wondered about "carmine." Is it a bomb you put on a car to make it blow up? A hole in the ground where you dig for cars? Or is it pidgin for "my car?" Oooh, I know: it's a corruption of "karma mine," which is a place where you take out only what you put in.

Well, no. Sadly, it's none of those things, although they would absolutely make the world a more interesting place.

It is a not-unpopular name, especially for those of Italian origin, and one with several cognates, including Carmen (as in Sandiego) and Carmelita. But it turns out that the name has two origins, like a river with a fork: one from Latin, meaning song, and one from Hebrew, meaning garden. Not that famous "first" garden, though; that was something like paradise. (No, really, the original Hebrew word for it is also translated as paradise.) Just your regular old garden, though presumably one with flowers and bushes rather than cabbages. If one were poetically inclined, one could say that the name Carmine might mean "garden of song," which would presumably be attached to Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song."

The way Hebrew might have gotten mixed up with Latin to create that name, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

I say all this because one might be forgiven for thinking that the name and the word for a certain deep red color share an origin. They do not. Though one Carmine I heard of, Carmine Infantino, was a comic book artist well-known in some circles (comic readers) for a great run on the Deadman series, and Deadman wore a carmine-colored onesie. Coincidence? Well, actually, yeah. Infantino was drawing an established character. Also, only the reader (and maybe other dead people in the comic) could see Deadman, as he was a ghost. His superpower was possession, incidentally.

What's not a coincidence is that carmine and crimson, the color words, share a linguistic root. In the analogy above, that would be two rivers sharing a single source, which is kind of uncommon for rivers when compared to the other way around, but not so rare in language.

No, carmine-the-color came from bugs.

Apparently, there was this one species of insect which, when tortured, killed, and ground up, produced the carmine dye. I have no idea if this is still the practice, but at least no insects were harmed in making that color in your photo editing software. After all, something's gotta live in your garden.