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Still, ’colour language’ has not been uprooted completely. For example, we still give white flowers to elderly ladies, and red roses to younger ‘targets’. My book Sicilian Subvariations (everything other than 1.e4 c5 2.¤f3 and 3.d4), a joint effort with my friends in 1994 (it was part of the BLACK IS OK! repertoire series, published in 5 (!) languages - Hungarian, English, German, French and Spanish - AT THE SAME TIME!), included a short piece in which I analysed the overwhelmingly negative associations of the colour BLACK in Western culture. I (or any of you) can list at least 10-12 phrases at once (BLACK market, BLACK widow for scorpion, BLACK CAT that brings misfortunes if it crosses the road in front of you etc.) in a minute, and about 90-95% of these are sinister or sad. I will not list any more of them here, as my wife and I have collected a huge and rather homogenous BLACKNESS from several large dictionaries, and it can’t be squeezed into a text. I won’t even list all phrases at the end of this chapter, as 49 and a half examples are probably sufficient for you, dear Readers, to draw your conclusions, so we can be merciful to you and spare you the rest… Seeing so many examples with an utterly ’dark’ tendency, we can rightfully claim that the colour BLACK is depressive to almost all people, if only subconsciously. White, on the other hand, usually symbolises purity, innocence and immaculacy. Typically enough, harmless little lies are called white lies in English. So what we have on the chessboard is the battle of GOOD and EVIL! GOOD feels morally superior, and EVIL is co-operative in making this feeling even stronger. This is in complete contrast with ’real life’, where the most ruthless assassins have the lightest of dreams and no pricks of conscience whatsoever. It’s simply scandalous! It’s scandalous that chess players, who are often quite superstitious creatures anyway, are given BLACK pieces as the ’second player’! I am definitely convinced that the juxtaposition of these two colours is largely responsible for the psychological handicap of the ’second(ary) player’ that makes BLACK less successful than he could be! The FIDE regulations reads as follows: ’The pieces of one side have to be lighter, the pieces of the other side have to be darker, and the different pieces have to be easily distinguishable’. There is not a single word about BLACK - and White! Let me repeat - there are quite a few pairs of colours that satisfy the FIDE rule. We played a rapid tournament (Bela Papp Memorial ’95) with ’colourful’ chess sets. Red playing Blue was not bad, but Ochre taking on Purple was truly fantastic. On top of that, such chess sets make it much less tiring to play. Anyone who has already worked in the basement with no natural light will know what I am talking about. There is also this ’second player’-’first player’ thing. A native speaker may not feel the same as I do: why ’first’? Why ’second’? Why not, say, ’anziende / nachziende’ (starting to move, moving after) as in German? Don’t the words ’first’ and ’second’ imply a certain judgement by themselves? As I have said several times, BLACK is the ’Negro’ of the chessboard, and apartheid is forbidden by international agreements. I do hope that these strict rules will come into force on the chessboard one day! Some meanings of the word BLACK from The Oxford Encyclopaedic English Dictionary:
A few more phrases:
What do YOU think about this, folks?
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