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I have always thought it an interesting feature of English that there are so many synonyms or words derived from the color "red" and many fewer for other colors. For example, if you sought words derived from "green," your best bet would be to look up the prefix "vert," and there you would find a few. Or, you might try looking under "amar" or "jaun" for "yellow-like" words, even though you might become "embittered" quickly as you realized that there were so few. But not with red. Even if you just studied the Collegiate dictionary you have such a profusion of words suggesting redness that it sets you wondering. Is red really that much more prevalent in our culture that we have so many words to describe red things? Well, just to show you what I mean. We have the following "red" words in the Collegiate-

1. Ruby, rubifacient, rubicund--that is, beginning with "rub."
2. Ruddy
3. Rufescent
4. Russet
5. Rutilant

So, the color "red," which is derived ultimately from the Latin "rubere" ("to be red") seems to rob the "rubs" and "ruds" and other prefixes. And, that's the rub. Why should it be so prevalent?

Then, as I was pondering that question, I decided to look up the "rubs" and "rufs" etc, in the OED, which is a much more complete, though not completely exhaustive, dictionary of our language. I was stunned. The number of "rub" words alone referring to red or redness exceeds twenty. I will turn to some of them in the next essay, but I want to conclude this essay with one of them--rubric.

Rubric

You know you are in a master's or doctoral program when your professors start using the word "rubric" a lot. It, like deconstruction, disgust, fear and loathing and many other words, is part of the language of academia. What is a "rubric?" It is a category or a general rule. As Carlyle said in 1831: "Many sections are of a debatable rubric, or even quite nondescript and unnameable." By the late 1880s the term had taken on its current usage: "Colette's was not a hell; it could not come..under the rubric of a gilded saloon." We often talk about dividing things into "rubrics" or categories. That is why the word has made its way into the academic world--academicians divide things in categories.

But the word is ultimately derived from the Latin "rubere," which means to be red. How so? Here is the story. As far back as the 15th century rubric meant "red earth, red ochre, ruddle." In the 16th and 17th centuries it appeared to be a kind of medicinal remedy, as indicated by this 1607 quotation: "This marrow [of a hart]..in sheeps milk, with rubrick and soft pitch, drunk every day..helpeth the ptisick (phthisic) and obstructions." What is ruddle? It is "a red variety of ochre used for marking sheep and for coloring; red ochre, reddle." Hm. Now the loop is almost closed, isn't it, from "rub" to "rud" to "red." So, ruddle was a kind of soft red stone or chalk which was originally used to mark your sheep.

One quotation using the word ruddle takes us down another road, which I will only go down 20 feet and then turn around. Ruddle is also defined in a 1565 Thesaurus as "Sinopis, a redde stone commonly called Sinoper, or Ruddle." By searching through various "sinop"-type words in the OED, you finally come to Sinopic, meaning "obtained from Sinope (a Greek colony in Paphlagonia) or its neighborhood." There we have it--Cappadocian Earth, also call'd Sinopic, as Theophrastus tells us, which is synonymous with ruddle, which is synonymous with rubric, which is where we started. Let's continue, then.

How Rublic Developed

So, how did we get from a red substance used as a medicinal remedy, or a red chalky substance used to mark sheep, to categories and divisions? A fifteenth century quotation gets us started in this direction, but Phillips 1658 dictionary helps us out a lot. It defines Rubrick as "a noted sentence of any book marked with red Letters." So, we go from the red object to a marking of red to a marking of red in a book. It first marks a sentence that you might want to highlight, but then starts to mark chapter headings, which you definitely want to mark. Thus rubric becomes synonymous with the marking of anything you want to distinguish in a book. It is only a short jump between this and rubric being used to describe a category of something.

The "red" part of rubric also has a theological meaning as a "direction for the conduct of divine service inserted in liturgical books, and properly written or printed in red." Foxe's Book of Martyrs uses rubric in this sense: "The whole Canon of the Masse, with the Rubricke thereof, as it standeth in the Masse-booke." Though this was the case in 1583, the red headings have fallen by the wayside. Thus, when the word rubric is used today it has all its "red" drained out of it. Yet the word remains, a testimony to an earlier time and a different need. We don't need to highlight things in red anymore in order to give them special attention. We can divide things in chapters, highlight specific passages, bold them, italicize them, write them in 16-point type, underline them, etc. But just once, when I hear that term, I would love for such a user to pull out a book from the 16th century to show us what a true rubric was. I don't think the user, or we, would ever use the word in the "category" way thereafter.

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