Writing Exercise: Color List – Yellow

The sun is still high up in the sky so the color for this month of August is the color of the sun – yellow.

For the uninitiated, the idea here is to come up with ways to evoke yellow without mentioning the color itself. One of the challenges in writing effective descriptions is getting the color just right. Each month on this blog we work on one color. So far we’ve done green, pink, and blue. Today, let’s come up with nouns and adjectives that bring yellow to mind.

In thinking about yellow, I’ve realized that there are cultural connotations to colors:

For example, in Germany, there is such a thing as “postgelb,” which means “post yellow,” referring to the fact that mail boxes in Germany are a certain kind of yellow. That wouldn’t make sense in the U.S. where mailboxes are a certain type of blue. But we do have taxis in yellow! Similarly, in England the phone booths of yesteryear were a certain shade of red.

Anyway, here’s my initial list (lots of food stuff!), please contribute:

banana
butter
corn
curry
custard
egg yolk
gold
lemon
mustard
saffron
school bus
straw
sulphur
sun
sunflower
taxis
urine