Earnest Loki Forest

Old English eornost, seriousness, zeal. Used as a color modifier since the nineteenth century for hues that read as committed but unshowy — the working blues of denim, the deep greens of Quaker meetinghouses. Sits in the bold-and-quiet corner of the grid, slightly less luminous than resolute and slightly less institutional than imperial.

Old Norse Loki, trickster-god-and-shape-shifter. As a color modifier, loki implies a trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly quality, the visual register of Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster hand-trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster-and-Ragnarok loki-and-trickster-and-shape-shifter-and-sly surfaces under Norse-Loki-and-Asgard-trickster-and-Ragnarok Yggdrasil-and-Aesir-pantheon shape-shifter-light. Sits at the modifier-and-myth end of the grid, parallel to thor and odin in usage.

The dense canopy of a temperate or tropical woodland — oak, beech, pine, eucalyptus, mahogany — wherever leaves close above to filter the light below. Forest green refers to the average reflectance of a healthy mid-summer canopy seen from below: a saturated, slightly muted green with the matte finish of layered chlorophyll. Deeper than fern, cooler than olive, with the ecological weight of a word that has named every wooded biome on Earth.