Talk:blush

flush & blush

The fact that flush and blush share a meaning “turn red in embarrassment from flow of blood to face” and sounds very similar is interesting, but AFAICT these words are completely unrelated, as etymologies indicate. It’s conceivable that blush (older term in this sense) influenced the “turn red” sense of flush, apparently from 1620s, but that seems a stretch.

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 15:25, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

verbal sense "change colour (to a particular shade)"

I'm not convinced that this is a transitive sense. The colour words that follow "blush" function more like adjectives, and one finds phrases such as "blushed redder and redder," "blushed very red" etc. This is comparable to the copulative use of turn. Compare: "the leaves turned a deep shade of orange," in which "a deep shade of orange" is definitely not the direct object of "turned." Aabull2016 (talk) 05:30, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Missing noun sense?

Chambers 1908 has "sudden appearance". We've got at first blush, but should we have the sense here? How else is it used? Equinox ◑ 18:49, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

What would establish this sense would be instances of "blush of" in which the colour senses could be ruled out. I can find plenty of uses in which "sudden appearance" is a possible gloss (e.g. "(first) blush of morning" or "blush of spring") but the contexts in which these appear almost always indicate that a colour sense is at least a component of the intended meaning, and I think it's best to see them as metaphoric uses that take advantage of the multiple implications of the the word. Even phrases like "the first blush of national enthusiasm" (1901) and "the Elizabethan drama turned from its first blush of feverish invention and optimism" (1984) seem to me to play on the physiological sense. Aabull2016 (talk) 16:51, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

I think at first blush is one of those expressions that we analyze in a different sense than what was originally intended. Especially since it often precedes a statement that turns out to be untrue ... before I looked it up, I'd always assumed it was an indication that the speaker was already embarrassed at seeing something they did not understand, and then more so (the unstated "and at second blush") when they realized that they were wrong. In that analysis, the one doing the blushing is the speaker, not what they're looking at. Now I know that isnt the origin of the expression, but I still use it as though it were, since I think that's what the wider population hears it as. Which would mean that I dont think blush in its bare form can carry the meaning of "to come into view, to appear" anymore.

As an aside, I wonder if this expression is old enough that it refers to the belief that our eyes cast light on objects, meaning it is really "when I first saw it (made it visible by looking at it)". —Soap— 06:42, 10 March 2023 (UTC)