Earnest Slush 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.

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.

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.