Language and politics

I've been having a loooong argument on facebook recently about this article about the use of the phrase 'flesh coloured' to describe Mrs Obama's dress at a recent event. At 45 comments, it's probably the biggest facebook debate I've ever had. I initially re-posted the article simply because I found it hilarious. My friend, however, got on the defensive and argued that the term 'flesh coloured' had nothing to do with the colour of flesh. After a lot of debate about the need to be sensitive with language, I eventually decided to try and find a more solid argument, so here it is.



Let's set aside the emotive, political stuff for a second. I contend that the statement 'her dress was flesh coloured' is factually inaccurate, and here's why.

Grammatically, the phrase 'flesh coloured' could be read in two ways.

In one reading, the phrase acts as a single sentential object, 'flesh coloured', which is a label which refers to a specific colour, a shade of peach. In this reading, the phrase acts in a similar way to 'red', 'blue', or 'green'.

In the second, the phrase is in two parts, 'flesh' 'coloured'. In this reading, 'coloured' acts as a quantifier to describe how 'flesh' relates to 'dress' - the relation of colour. By this reading we could re-arrange 'flesh coloured' to 'the colour of flesh'. This looks weird if we were to replace 'flesh' with 'red', since you wouldn't say 'the dress was red coloured'. But I argue that this is because you know 'red' is a colour, since it doesn't refer to anything else - so you drop the 'coloured' quantifier as it is unnecessary (this fits with Chomsky's 'the language faculty is economically thrifty' explanation of sentence structure). But you don't know flesh is a colour, since it also refers to skin. You could say 'her dress was red', but 'her dress was flesh' has a rather strange initial reading.
By this reading, 'flesh coloured' would equate to 'sand coloured'. Similarly, you might use other objects, such as they sky, to illustrate a colour, 'sky blue'. In this case the colour is an analogy - 'the colour of the dress was similar to the colour of sand/the sky/flesh'. In this case the statement 'her dress was flesh coloured' is false, because not all flesh is that colour, so the analogy doesn't hold - or at least is insufficiently specific, like saying 'her dress was car coloured'.
The sky is not always blue, hence 'sky blue'. If one said 'her dress was flesh peach', it would be more accurate, since 'flesh' would quantify over 'peach' (and, less obviously, vice-versa) in the same way 'sky' quantifies over 'blue', to give a particular shade of blue, and a particular hue of sky.

While I can see why you would think the first is the true meaning of the phrase, I think it makes a lot more linguistic sense to view the second reading as more grammatically accurate. 'Flesh coloured' is, to me, a compound phrase where 'coloured' denotes an analogical relationship between flesh and the object described as 'flesh coloured'. By this reading the statement 'Mrs Obama's dress was flesh coloured' is obviously false, and the humour derives from the very obviousness of this in the case cited.



I would re-paste the whole debate, but I'd have to edit out the names and that would take a long time. If anyone wants to read it, just ask and I'll either do the work or add you as a friend on facebook. For those already my friend, you can find it here.