If you wanted to use etymology to demonstrate the ethnocentrism of sixteenth-century Western Europeans, the history of the word carnation would be a good place to start. When it found its way into the English lexicon circa 1540, carnation originally meant “the color of skin.” This definition makes sense when you consider that the noun was borrowed from the Middle French carnation, which meant “complexion” and was itself derived from a classical Latin adjective, carnosus, that meant “fleshy” or “flesh-like.” Yet sometime during the 1590s—an era when most, if not all, English speakers were Caucasian—the English carnation came to be applied not to skin pigmentation in general but to a specific rosy pink color and a naturally pink flower (Dianthus caryophyllus), and if a semantic shift from “skin color” to “rosy pink” isn't an indicator of sixteenth-century Caucasoid conceit, nothing is.
©2022 Michael R. Gates
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