Yellow (nonfiction)

Examples of the color yellow.

Yellow is the color between orange and green on the spectrum of visible light.

Description

Yellow is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 570–590 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing. In the RGB color model, used to create colors on television and computer screens, yellow is a secondary color made by combining red and green at equal intensity. Carotenoids give the characteristic yellow color to autumn leaves, corn, canaries, daffodils, and lemons, as well as egg yolks, buttercups, and bananas. They absorb light energy and protect plants from photodamage. Sunlight has a slight yellowish hue, due to the surface temperature of the sun.

Because it was widely available, yellow ochre pigment was one of the first colors used in art; the Lascaux cave in France has a painting of a yellow horse 17,000 years old. Ochre and orpiment pigments were used to represent gold and skin color in Egyptian tombs, then in the murals in Roman villas. In the early Christian church, yellow was the color associated with the Pope and the golden keys of the Kingdom, but was also associated with Judas Iscariot and was used to mark heretics. In the 20th century, Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were forced to wear a yellow star. In China, bright yellow was the color of the Middle Kingdom, and could be worn only by the Emperor and his household; special guests were welcomed on a yellow carpet.

According to surveys in Europe, Canada, and the United States, yellow is the color people most often associate with amusement, gentleness, humor, and spontaneity, but also with duplicity, envy, jealousy, avarice, and, in the U.S., with cowardice. In Iran it has connotations of pallor/sickness, but also wisdom and connection. In China and many Asian countries, it is seen as the color of happiness, glory, harmony and wisdom.

TV yellow

User DoctorDuck: "The color was generally known as 'TV yellow' and was common in early graphics (type) generators like Compositor and Chyron. It was the 'official' color of CBS titles. It lies close to the 'I' axis of the NTSC color system, where human flesh tone lives, and so is less subject to distortions (the 'I' channel has the higher bandwidth of the I & Q axes)."

• Comment @ Boing Boing

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against light
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Golden Spiral

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Color (nonfiction)
• Light (nonfiction)

External links

• Yellow @ Wikipedia
• [ The Yellow Wallpaper] @ Wikipedia: ""The Yellow Wallpaper" (original title: "The Yellow Wall-paper. A Story") is a short story by American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine.[1] It is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, due to its illustration of the attitudes towards mental and physical health of women in the 19th century. Narrated in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. Forgoing other rooms in the house, the couple moves into the upstairs nursery. As a form of treatment, the unnamed woman is forbidden from working, and is encouraged to eat well and get plenty of air, so she can recuperate from what he calls a "temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency", a diagnosis common to women during that period."