My parents recorded me right after I woke up from getting my wisdom teeth removed, and turns out I am actually terrible at Icelandic while on anesthesia.

My parents asked me how I was and I replied with “ég er appelsína” which basically means “I am an orange.”

I believe this is my cue to start my word of the day, or two words in this case, so no one makes this mistake in the future. It is interesting how in the English language, we have this phenomenon with using two words to mean the exact same thing, like the color “orange” and the fruit “orange.” (Of course, other languages do this as well, but it is interesting, as an English speaker, to actually see what words are chosen to replace or work alongside others). So, the words “orange” and “orange,” how do you distinguish them in Icelandic? Well, its easy! Let’s break it down:

Appelsína, is simply named as the fruit. Not to be confused with our English “apple,” which is “epli.” (I will never own up to making this mistake).

And here we have the color orange, a simple combination that I will diagram here:

(Appelsína) + (gulur) = Appelsínugulur

translated into english:

  ((an)orange) + (yellow) = Orange-Colored

So there you have it, kids! To mix orange on the color wheel you just mash up an orange and mix it with some sort of yellow pigment and AHA! Orange colored paint. I’m a design student and there is no wonder I have never been able to mix a decent orange.