What is it about days and colours that makes them such happy pairs? Journalists, marketers, idealists, they all love to give the days of the week a dab of paint: just google for Black Monday, Yellow Tuesday, Red Wednesday and Green or Purple Friday, and you’ll find all sorts of catastrophes, sales campaigns, football matches, environmental activism and gay solidarity.

Most of these are recent inventions, but others have long become household terms, in English or other languages. Here’s an incomplete list – feel free to add.

Blue Monday
Long before becoming a popular meme for a day in late January, claimed to be the gloomiest of the year, ‘blue Monday’ was already a well-known idiom in Dutch: blauwe maandag. Somebody who read philosophy ‘for a blue Monday’ studied it for a very short period and unsuccessfully. As for why a Monday and why blue, nobody is sure, though theories abound. Continue reading →