SKY-BLUE PINK
[Q] From Ellen Smithee, California: “I heard a phrase a few years back from a former colleague. She was telling me about a poem she wrote that was about a sky-blue pink dress; when I asked about this, she said it was a phrase for a magical fantasy color that she had always known. Are you familiar with it?”
[A] Yes, it was well known to my mother in London in the 1940s and also to my wife’s mother, another Londoner. This might suggest that it’s British, but it turns out to be American.
The earliest example I can find — which seems highly likely to be the origin — is in a story by Howard R Garis. He was a famous, and extraordinarily prolific, American children’s writer of the first half of the twentieth century. In 1910, he invented Uncle Wiggily, the rheumatic elderly rabbit, while working for the Newark News, and over four decades wrote one story a day for the paper. He also authored more than 30 stories about the adventures of Tom Swift under the pen name of Victor Appleton and lots more under other names — such as Laura Lee Hope, Lester Chadwick, Roy Rockwood, and Clarence Young — some 500 books in total.
The expression sky-blue-pink appears in the first collection of Uncle Wiggily stories, Sammie and Susie Littletail, published in 1910, in which one young rabbit suffers a misfortune: “He splashed around and scattered the skilligimink color all over the kitchen, and when his mamma and Susie fished him out, if he wasn’t dyed the most beautiful sky-blue-pink you ever saw!” [Don’t ask me about skilligimink: he seems to have been the only person ever to use the word, and where it comes from is unknown.]
The term begins to appear in places other than his own writings in the years that followed, always in children’s stories. By the 1930s, it was widely known and had crossed the Atlantic to Britain. Since millions of copies of the Uncle Wiggily stories have been sold, and many of his books are still in print, the expression continues to be introduced to new generations.
British people know several elaborations of it, often half a century old or more. Examples include sky-blue pink with purple dots or sky-blue pink with yellow spots on. A form once popular in northern England was sky blue pink with a finny addy border, finny addy being a corruption of finnan haddock, a type of cold-cured smoked fish, named after Findon in Scotland; presumably its yellowish colour was the reason for including it. The expression has been variously used — by exasperated adults to children when pestered about colours, as a hand-waving term meaning “whatever colour you want”, as a “mind your own business” reply to an unwanted question, or a sarcastic description of some over-the-top or inappropriate colour.
