Wednesday, October 3, 2018

How I'm Handling Pinktober This Year

Pinktober heralds the arrival of so much pink that some of us run screaming from the sight of it, despite the good intentions of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As I explain how I have made my peace with pink, you might feel better about your own choices.


PUBLISHED October 02, 2018

Felicia Mitchell is a poet and writer who makes her home in southwestern Virginia, where she teaches at Emory & Henry College. She was diagnosed with Stage 2b HER2-positive breast cancer in 2010. Website: www.feliciamitchell.net
Pink, pronounced "pingk," is a simple word: one morpheme, one syllable, four graphemes (letters). Even the internal vowel sound is a simple monophthong, although sometimes I speak the word to see if it is influenced by my southern drawl to include a diphthong. With the right intonation, "pink" does take on a twang.

While the origin of the word is not certain, according to "Oxford English Dictionary," it likely entered the English language as a word for a color (some combination of red and white) because of the pink flower family. As I have learned on hikes with naturalists, the flowers of this Dianthus family need not be colored pink. There are pink, red and white pinks in the natural world.


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