Incarnadine, the Bloody Red of Fashionable Cosmetics and Shakespearean Poetics
Janelle Monáe at the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscar party. Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images
When looking up the word incarnadine in Merriam Webster I found some truly discomforting writing. After a brief definition of the word (“having the pinkish color of flesh” or “blood red”), there appears a drop-down box with an editor’s note. “Carn- is the Latin root for ‘flesh,’ and incarnates is Latin for ‘flesh-colored,’ ” the entry begins, under the rather perky headline DID YOU KNOW? Okay, so far so good. But then, following a quick timeline of the word in question (incarnadine dates back to the late 1500s), the unnamed editor tells us this: “Since then, the adjective has come to refer to the dark-red color of freshly cut, fleshy meat as well as to the pinkish color of the outer skin of some humans.”
I read that passage and felt a record scratch reverberate through my skull. It reads as though an AI wrote this passage, but only after being feed a steady diet of Thomas Harris. This is not how people talk about bodies color. This is how cannibalistic robots think about humans—pink, fleshy, freshly cut, bodies in
