Posted by Ed Kiser on August 13, 2013 at 10:52:15 user Kisered.
In Reply to: Colour polarity posted by David Bamford on August 12, 2013 at 15:34:47:
David - thanks for reminding me of the "us / them" concept of Chess being a contest between Black and White tokens on the board. In view of the association of the word "black" indicating as a negative while the "white" is a positive indicator. we see even in Chess Rules that "white" gets to move first, which is to start off with a bit of an advantage.
In considering the preferential start for "white" we can see that there is also additional inequality between the two sides of the chessboard, in that for "white", the King is to the right of the Queen, whereas for "black" the King is to the left of the Queen. This puts the two Kings facing each other across the board, and likewise the two Queens are also at opposite ends of the same vertical column of squares. Not saying one configuration has an advantage over the other, but their starting positions are not identical.
In terms of preferential treatment of these two words, I believe it is more common to say "black and white" rather than to say "white and black" - at least, that is a gut feel as to which sounds the most normal to me.
A police patrol car is sometimes called a "black and white".
However, in "Alice Through the Looking-Glass" where Alice in her dream-adventure was on some sort of huge chessboard inhabited with chess pieces, the Queen she encountered was neither white nor black, but RED. As for the other team's name, there was a White Knight, so that was a contest between "Red and White".
All this about names, colorful names. Not to quote him exactly, but there was a famous Englishman who had something to say about the names we use, which, with a little shift from the original, went something like this: "What's in a name? A rose by any other name is still a thorn bush." (Please forgive me, William...).
Still, in today's world it is a bit startling to see leaping off the Ransome pages words like "Black was black and white was white..." PM CH8
In this world of "us and them" there is that old story back in our early colonial days about the colony of New Amsterdam, Dutch. However with the arrival of British ships (with guns) arriving there in that harbor, it was quickly decided that this was now a British colony, things being how they were and all. This also meant that new colonists would be added to this location, meaning now that there would be two peoples there, Dutch and English. It is not all that unusual when two ethnic groups are placed together that each seem to develop an "affectionate" name for "them" as a meaningful handy handle to label "them" by. As they became a bit more familiar with each other, the Dutch noticed that their new British neighbors liked cheese, and a relatively common British name was "John". So they came up with "John Cheese" as their "affectionate" name for "them". Of course, in Dutch, it came out as "Jan kaas". Of course, the British got wind of this label, and in their attempt to wrap a British tongue around a foreign word, came up with "Yan Keese", a sound that ended in "s" so obviously that was a plural, so if we just drop the "s" we have a singular, so came up with the word that we know today as "Yankee". So now, you know who the original Yankees were, they were the British neighbors of the Dutch in the new colony known as New York. And now you know the rest of the story...
Wonder what the "affectionate" name the British came up with to label "them" - the Dutch neighbors...
Oh, my - the things that studying All Things Ransome has taught us, (and them, too).
Ed Kiser, Kentucky (kisered AT aol DOT com)