Calm Slush Teal

Latin calma, heat of the day — paradoxically drifted in Italian to mean stillness. Used as a color modifier since the seventeenth century for hues that read as untroubled. Calm blue, calm gray: moderate saturation combined with optical quiet. Sits at the crisp-bucket near quiet and steady.

Imitative origin, half-melted-snow. As a color modifier, slush implies a half-melted-snow-and-grey-pavement quality, the visual register of city-pavement-and-thaw-slush hand-half-melted-snow-and-grey-pavement city-pavement-and-thaw-slush-and-Boston-Brooklyn-thaw slush-and-half-melted-snow-and-grey-pavement surfaces under city-pavement-and-thaw-slush-and-Boston-Brooklyn-thaw Boston-and-Brooklyn-and-Edinburgh-thaw urban-thaw-light. Sits at the modifier-and-weather end of the grid, parallel to thaw and flurry in usage.

Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.