Brown - Brown in Culture

Brown in Culture

Animal Rights

• The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Edwardian England from 1903 until 1910.

Business

• Pullman Brown is the color of the United Parcel Service (UPS) delivery company with their trademark brown trucks and uniforms; it was earlier the color of Pullman rail cars of the Pullman Company, and was adopted by UPS both because brown is easy to keep clean, and due to favorable associations of luxury that Pullman brown evoked. UPS has filed two trademarks on the color brown to prevent other shipping companies (and possibly other companies in general) from using the color if it creates "market confusion." In its advertising, UPS refers to itself as "Brown" ("What can Brown do for you?").

City Planning

• Brownfields are abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where redevelopment for infill housing is complicated by real or perceived environmental contaminations.
• Chandler, Arizona has brown street signs at most of its intersections rather than the usual green or blue.

Computing

• Ubuntu is well known for its default brown color scheme. The exact shades have changed from release to release, with a general trend towards lighter colors and 'shiny' graphics.

Ethnography

• Brown is sometimes used to refer to brown people in general or sometimes more specifically to the darker skinned Indo-Aryan and Dravidian of South Asia.
• The term brown or bronze may be used by mestizo or Amerindian Hispanics to describe themselves.
• Austronesians in the 19th century and 20th century were often referred to as the Malayan race or brown race. (A term for Austronesians often used today is Maritime Asian.)
• In her 1942 Glossary of Harlem Slang, Zora Neale Hurston placed "high yaller" at the beginning of the entry for her African American colorscale, which ran:

Idioms

• "To be brown as a berry" (to be deeply suntanned)
• "To brown bag" a meal (to bring food from home to eat at work or school rather than patronizing an in-house cafeteria or a restaurant)
• "To experience a brown out" (a partial loss of electricity, less severe than a blackout)

Movies

• Four shades of brown is the title of a Swedish film from 2004.

Music

• Little Brown Jug is a drinking song written in 1869 by Joseph Winner.
• Brown Sugar is one of the most popular songs by the Rolling Stones (Album: Sticky Fingers).
• The song "Brown Eyed Girl" is by Van Morrison (Album: Blowin' Your Mind!).
• The song "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver" is by the artist Primus (Album: Tales from the Punchbowl).
• Golden Brown is a popular song about heroin by The Stranglers.

Nature

• Many soils are brown.
• Many kinds of wood and the bark of many trees are brown.
• A large number of mammals and predatory birds have a brown coloration. This sometimes changes seasonally, and sometimes remains the same year-round. This color is likely related to camouflage, since the backdrop of some environments, such as the forest floor, is often brown, and especially in the spring and summertime when animals like the Snowshoe Hare get brown fur.

Parapsychology

• It is said that people who have brown auras are often unethical businessmen who are in business purely for the sake of greed, or people who are just generally greedy and avaricious.

Politics

• In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the Nazi paramilitary organization the Sturmabteilung (SA) wore brown uniforms and were known as the brownshirts. It was often said of members of the SA that they were like a beefsteak--"brown on the outside, and red on the inside"—because many of them were former Communists. The color brown was used to represent the Nazi vote on maps of electoral districts in Germany. If someone voted for the Nazis, they were said to be "voting brown". The national headquarters of the Nazi party, in Munich, was called the Brown House. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was called the Brown Revolution. At Adolf Hitler's Obersalzberg home, the Berghof, he slept in a "bed which was usually covered by a brown quilt embroidered with a huge swastika. The swastika also appeared on Hitler's brown satin pajamas, embroidered in black against a red background on the pocket. He had a matching brown silk robe."

Sexuality

• In the bandana code of the gay leather subculture, wearing a brown bandana means that one is into the sexual fetish of scat.

Sports

• Brown is sometimes used as a team color or name, as in the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League, which got its name from its founder and long-time coach, Paul Brown, but also uses brown as a team color. The St. Louis Browns are a former Major League Baseball team, now known as the Baltimore Orioles; they do not use brown as a team color. For about 25 years, the San Diego Padres had brown as a primary team color.

Television

• In the TV show Firefly, a browncoat refers to a person who fought against the Anglo-Sino Alliance.