Baby Blue in Human Culture
Gender
- In Western culture, the color baby blue is often associated with baby boys (and baby pink for baby girls), particularly in clothing and linen and shoes. This is a recent tradition, however, and until the 1940s the convention was exactly the opposite: pink was considered the appropriate color for boys as the more masculine and "decided" while blue was the more delicate and dainty color and therefore appropriate for girls.
Law enforcement
- In the late 1960s, New Age philosopher Alan Watts, who lived in Sausalito, a suburb of San Francisco, suggested that police cars be painted baby blue and white instead of black and white. This proposal was implemented in San Francisco in the late 1970s. (In the late 1980s, the police cars of the San Francisco Police Department were repainted the usual black and white.) Watts also suggested that the police should wear baby blue uniforms because, he asserted, this would make them less likely to commit acts of police brutality than if they were wearing the usual dark blue uniforms. This proposal was never implemented.
Read more about this topic: Baby BLUE
Famous quotes containing the words baby, blue, human and/or culture:
“Unless your baby becomes uncomfortable and tries to push away, don’t worry that you’re cuddling too much. That way, when she reaches adolescence and goes through a normal period of being terribly embarrassed even to be seen with you in public, you’ll have some memories to tide you over until she comes around again.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)
“Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)