Do You Call Colored Pencils “Pencil Colors”? You Might Be From Louisiana or Mississippi

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Paige. I’m calling from Michigan.

Hey, Paige, welcome to the show.

What’s up?

So, though I’m calling from Michigan, both me and my spouse, we were raised in Louisiana.

And that kind of plays into my question today.

So, my husband and I were at an arts and crafts store one day.

And he’s an artist.

And I said, oh, do you need some more pencil colors? They’re on sale.

He looked at me and he goes, pencil colors? What do you mean?

I said, you know, pencil colors, like they’re on sale. Do you need any?

He said, you mean colored pencils?

And I said, colored pencils, pencil colors, you know, same thing.

He goes, no, that’s not the same thing. Why would you ever say pencil colors?

So it got me thinking that I called them pencil colors growing up.

And all of my that I could remember, that was the word we used in school.

Get out your pencil colors. You know, we’re going to color this coloring sheet in elementary school.

So I had a suspicion of maybe where the phrase came from, but I took it to my Facebook and I asked my Facebook friends because, you know, what else do you do in 2020?

But ask your Facebook friends.

I got kind of a varied response, but most of the people who responded saying, yeah, that’s the phrase I use for the colored pencils were from South Louisiana.

So I was thinking that maybe we call them pencil colors or it’s more common to call these writing utensils pencil colors because of the French influence.

And I was just wondering if you’ve ever heard about that or if you had any thoughts.

Wow, this is wonderful because I don’t think this is in any of my dialect dictionaries.

Martha, do you have any record of this pencil code?

I don’t.

And one question that springs to mind immediately, Paige, is what do you call crayons?

Those waxy, colorful things.

Yeah.

We just call them crayons.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

And the reason we ask is that crayon is French for pencil.

And it’s very confusing to anklophones because that’s one of those faux amis.

It’s one of the very obvious mistakes that you might make.

I think you might be right.

And I have a couple things to add to that about it coming from French.

Because in regular French, you would say crayon de couleur to mean colored pencil.

Again, crayon doesn’t mean English crayon in French.

It means pencil.

So you’re basically saying pencil of color, which sounds like pencil color.

And it’s what we call a calque.

You probably heard us mention that word on the show before, that C-A-L-Q-U-E.

A calque is when a word is moved from language A to language B, and it just simply translated directly.

Exactly. Word for word.

Right.

I mean, obviously we’ve taken the duh or the of out, but it’s otherwise a calc.

In Louisiana French, it might sound a little bit more like crayon or couleur, something like that, because they do a juh for the y rather than a yuh.

And the other thing I’d add to this is there’s a tradition in small town newspapers in America to post the materials list for students for the coming school year in the newspaper.

So in newspapers all across Louisiana and actually in Mississippi, starting in around the 60s, well into the 2000s,

You can find student supply lists where the teachers are asking for their students to bring pencil colors.

Not colored pencils, but pencil colors.

And it confirms what you think.

And nowhere else in the United States do you find that listed.

Only in those two states, in Louisiana and Mississippi.

But I think you’re right.

I think it really is a French term migrated into English

And kind of settled there, and that is that.

And also the French influence is apparent in Mississippi.

People kind of forget that being just on the other side of the river

Isn’t much of a barrier for the language,

The French influence, to pop over.

So you’ll find it in Macomb, for example.

The earliest that I find it is 1939 in a wish list from a little girl writing to Santa Claus.

Aw.

That’s very sweet.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much.

That kind of confirms my thoughts, and I really enjoy that.

Paige, thank you for calling.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Yes, you have a great day.

Thanks, Paige.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

If you use pencil color to mean colored pencil, and you’re not from Louisiana,

Let us know, because we’ll put some pins on our little mental map here,

And maybe we can learn a little bit more about where this term is used like that.

Again, pencil color is a noun, meaning one colored pencil.

That’s 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.