Punchy Horus Cornflower

A modern adjectival form of punch, to strike sharply. Used as a color word since the early twentieth century for hues that read as highly contrasting and visually loud. Punchy red, punchy yellow: the implication is full saturation combined with optical impact. Sits across the bold and bright buckets, near vivid and striking.

Egyptian Heru, falcon-headed-sky-god. As a color modifier, horus implies a falcon-headed-and-Eye-of-Horus quality, the visual register of Egyptian-Horus-and-Edfu-temple hand-falcon-headed-and-Eye-of-Horus Egyptian-Horus-and-Edfu-temple-and-falcon-pharaoh horus-and-falcon-headed-and-Eye-of-Horus surfaces under Egyptian-Horus-and-Edfu-temple-and-falcon-pharaoh Edfu-Aswan-temple-and-falcon-throne falcon-eye-light. Sits at the modifier-and-myth end of the grid, parallel to isis and thoth in usage.

Centaurea cyanus, the small wild blue flower of European cereal fields — once a weed of wheat agriculture, now nearly extinct in the wild after a century of herbicides. The color refers to a fully open cornflower in summer: a saturated, slightly violet-shifted blue with the spiky daisy structure of the Asteraceae. Cooler than periwinkle, warmer than cobalt, with the agricultural weight of a flower whose name is a synonym for blue in the Slavic and German textile trade.