Content-Type: text/shitpost

A while back I said:

Harris names the tertiaries “olave” (orange-green), “slate” (green-purple), and “bronn” (purple-orange). I think “olave” and “bronn” are just alternate spellings of “olive” and “brown” but it is after midnight and I do not want to go downstairs to get out the Big Dictionary.

The Big Dictionary gives no hint as to what is going on here. It gives many different historical spellings of “brown” (“brun”, “broune”, etc.) but “bronn” is not among them. All of the alternate spellings seem to have fallen out of use by the beginning of the 18th century.

Similarly there have been many spellings of “olive” over the centuries, but “olave” is not one. Early citations are sparse. The OED has one from 1734 and then no others until 1853. (Recall that Harris's “olave” was from around 1769.) Oddly, the word seems to have been used to describe a skin complexion as early as 1602.