ABSTRACT
Colour and mood Consider for instance the link that we make between colours and moods. Asking
even quite young pupils ‘What colour is anger?’ is not a meaningless question to
them. A little further thought will throw up colour links to other feelings such as
envy, cowardice and fury, while Sherlock Holmes might well have gone into a
‘brown study’ and sent London criminals into a ‘blue funk’. Beyond that it’s easy to
find endless examples of what we might call multisensory words. ‘Soft’ for instance
is a touch word (kinaesthetic) and a sound word, while we might talk about the
wind as being bitter or sharp or cutting. All of these words have something in
common – austere, backbone, big, crisp, earthy, firm, flabby, green, high notes,
grip, lean, sharp, silky, soft, steely, undertones. They are all terms used by wine
tasters to describe the smell and taste of wine.
