Over the years, certain colours have tended to be associated with particular vices or with certain virtues or emotions. We remember Iago, for example, who warned his boss, Othello:
Beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
He was referring to the fact that a greenish complexion was formerly held to be indicative of envy, for the somewhat tenuous reason that the greeneyed members of the cat family tend disdainfully to "mock the meat they feed on", and this was seen as a reminder that jealousy mocks its victim by both loving and loathing it at the same time.
But in other contexts, green is indicative of joy and gladness, while yellow is the colour most aligned with jealousy. Almost universally, however, black is false and evil, white a sign of purity and innocence, and blue indicative of sincerity and hope. But manufacturers of paint have their own ideas about the significance of the various colours they display upon their shelves, and many of the names they choose owe their inspiration to the weather.
The blue of the sky, for example, is well reflected in any litany of popular distempers: "cloudy blue", "cloud", "cumulus", and "Mediterranean sky" are all variations of a bluey hue. Since it is often thought of as being rather cold, blue also tends to find itself twinned with snow and ice. "Snowy light" is a shade of blue, and so are "snowflake", "iceberg", "icicle" and "iceflow". But more surprisingly, the wind - in terms of paint at any rate - is also seen as blue, since "calm", "breeze", "storm" and "tempest" are all blues or bluey shades of grey. "Thunder", for reasons that are hard to understand, is blue as well, while "haze", "vapour" and "dewdrop" on the other hand, are green. And "flash", inexplicably, is a rather unexciting shade of grey.
Other constituents of this meteorological kaleidoscope include a shade of yellow branded "harvest mist", and a kind of orange labelled "misty morn". Both of these, perhaps, owe something to Shelley's picture of an autumn dawn "when the golden mists are born", but most of us, when it comes to morning mists, are more in tune with Masefield, who spoke of "a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking". And this impression is allowed for too: "lilac haze", "grey mist", and "morning mist", are all a sort of slatey grey, while just a shade away is "lavender mist", which seems to me to be a kind of mauve or purple.