LogFAQs > #968347692

Straughan posted...

Do blood veins look GREEN or BLUE to you?

Yes.

Or neither.

They've always sort of looked bluish-green to me, so I've never really seen it as one over the other.



Straughan posted...

It just donned on me that some people see veins as blue lol.

It just dawned on me that some people think the phrase is donned on me. I bet those people are a diamond dozen, for all intensive purposes.



Straughan posted...

Hey! And that thing kids used to say when we were kids about blood being blue before it came out of us. No wonder!! They were making that shit up because they saw blue veins!!

It's also where the phrase "blue bloods" comes from.

Rich people didn't need to work outside. Poor people did. So for most of human history tan skin became associated with work and pale skin was a mark or wealth/nobility. And veins show up much better on pale skin than they do on tan skin, so the phrase generally became associated with the idea that the rich had "blue blood" (not literally).

It's really only over the last hundred years or so that things kind of flipped around. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and Tech Revolution making it more common for people to work inside (and thus becoming pale, pasty weirdos), we sort of flopped around on the idea that pale now means "bad" and tan means "good". Which is why we have artificial tanning.

There was a similar shift in weight. Standards of beauty used to value women who were fatter (because it meant they didn't need to work, and were more likely to carry a baby to term successfully), while skinny (or worse, muscular) women were clearly laborers (and thus poor and probably malnourished). But then the greater abundance of food over the last hundred or so years shifted things so now we tend to associate fat with laziness and unhealthy diet, and skinniness with someone who takes the time and effort to take care of themselves.

Humans are funny.