Deep orange

I tend to be a very verbal dreamer, sometimes even having "radio" dreams with no visual content at all. Last night my sleeping mind revealed to me the mysteries of orangeness.

The dream began with a sort of half-verbal, awe-filled brooding over the fact -- and a singularly momentous fact it seemed! -- that the orang-outang (for the dream used this archaic, or French or Dutch, spelling) is an orange animal, and that its name includes almost the whole word orange, despite the two words being completely etymologically unrelated! If that doesn't just blow your mind, well, that's probably a sign that you're not asleep.

I, however, was asleep, and my mind was suitably blown. But then it became even blown-er as a voice explained (for the dream had now become fully verbal) that the word orang-outang actually contained parts of not one but three similarly colored fruits: the orange, the mango, and the tangerine. It just doesn't get any deeper than this, folks!

Move over, bananas, coconuts, and grapes!

By then, the voice was on a roll, and further revelations about the deep, mind-blowing appropriateness of the English names of various orange-colored things came so quickly that I've only been able to remember a few of them. Here, for the benefit of posterity, they are:

Another orange fruit is the mandarine -- incorporating parts of mango and tangerine. Yet another orange fruit, the nectarine, is also clearly akin to mandarine and tangerine.

The name of the orange tiger harmonizes with tangerine and nectarine, and the orangutan's fellow orange-furred primate, the golden lion tamarin obviously has a name which is a portmanteau of tangerine and mandarine.

The main points should be clear by now: (1) the names of many orange things have many of the same letters, in the same order, as the names of other orange things, and (2) that's, like, deep.

Another, somewhat independent, family of orange things is represented by the pumpkin and persimmon, and perhaps a few other things I've forgotten. (These are not entirely independent from the others, though, as there are pumpkin-mandarine and persimmon-tangerine links.) The carrot and cantaloupe form another semi-independent group.

Finally, I remember that the voice noted that tan -- as in tangerine -- is a color closely akin to orange, especially in its dihydroxyacetone "spray tan" variant -- which Donald Trump used to use, and which has made him permanently "orange" in the minds of many. The real reason, the "orange" label has stuck, of course, is that the name Trump is made up of the tr of tiger and tangerine and the ump of pumpkin, with a hint of cantaloupe to boot.

Now you know.