a French folk etymology: bleu-jaune

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:46 PM -0400 9/8/08, Mark Mandel wrote:
>We visited New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art Saturday and had a
>great, if tiring, time.
>
>There's an exhibit there of "Pietre Dure", hard stone art in Europe:
>inlays, sculpture, mosaics, etc. One lovely item was a pair of perfume
>burners (61.101.1633,1634, catalog #138), made of "an intensely blue
>Derbyshire fluorspar commonly known as 'blue john'. ... It became
>popular among the nobility of France, where it was known as
>'bleu-jaune'." (Mostly exact quotation with connecting bits of
>paraphrase.)
>
>"Bleu-jaune" is literally 'blue - yellow', which makes no sense at all
>for this intense deep blue color. :-)
>
That's neat.  That was one of my favorite exhibitions at the Met, but
I somehow missed that particular caption.  The OED confirms that use
of the term--

A local name of the blue Fluor-spar found in Derbyshire.
1772 GILPIN Lakes Cumberland (1788) II. 217 It..is known in London by
the name of the Derbyshire drop. But on the spot it is called Blue
John, from the beautiful blue veins which overspread the finest parts
of it.
1840 W. HUMBLE Dict. Geol. & Min. (1843) s.v., The blue-john or fluor
spar mine near Castleton in Derbyshire.

--but assays no etymology for the "john" (or "John") part.  The
history of "bluejohn" > "bleu-jaune" tracks the (monolingual)
development of the Rhode Island state dessert, "johnnycake" (possibly
itself a naturalization of Narragansett "jonakin"), eventually
folk-etymologized > "journey cake".

LH

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