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vermilion Vivid red to reddish orange. A bright red mercuric sulfide (cinnabar) used as a pigment; also called “Chinese red.” (American Heritage Dictionary)

Recently, there has been some discussion on sports boards such as Ragin' Pagin', about the appearance around Lafayette of bizarre Cajuns merchandise, dominated by yellow.

Yellow.

As in "Blue & Yellow." "Maroon & Yellow."

"Purple & Yellow."

UL currently has a logo with five colors: red, white, black, silver... and either yellow or orange, depending on factors that aren't exactly clear.

So what, precisely, are UL's official colors?

According to the Blue Book of College Athletics, there are about 2200 four-year colleges and universities in the USA. One of them-- exactly one-- boasts the color vermilion.

The University of Louisiana.

UL's colors are vermilion and white... or as it has been said colloquially, "Vermilion Red & Evangeline White."

Vermilion has a fascinating history. The word comes from the French vermeil, from the Latin vermiculus, “small worm” (the cochineal), from vermis, worm or pest. So when The Vermilion publishes the April Fool edition, entitled The Vermin, they're actually not changing the word all that much.

Cochineal dye is made by pulverizing the bodies of certain insects, particularly females of the scale insect Dactylopius coccus. The cochineal pigment was first used by the Aztecs as a medicine, a dye, and a body paint. It was discovered for Europe by Hernando Cortez' troops in 1519. Once introduced to Europe, the dye became prized for the intensity and permanence of the color, and it became an important commercial commodity during the 17th and 18th centuries. Cochineal is very expensive: it takes 150 insects to produce a single gram of dye; 70,000 are needed to produce one pound. So vermilion became a mark of the European elite.

In fact, the cochineal dye was used to produce the British Army's Redcoats. Which brings up an interesting question: Where did Betsy Ross get her fabrics? Is it possible that the original colors of the USA were vermilion, white, and blue?

It is not clear why Vermilion Bay, and subsequently, the Vermilion River, were given that name. But on January 11 of UL's first session of 1901-1902, then-SLII played the first-ever football game in the city of Lafayette, and “Lafayette was ablaze with vermilion, the institute color.” (Times-Picayune, January 17, 1902). UL's school newspaper, The Vermilion, was founded during that same opening session.

All colors, of course, are actually a range of hues, so vermilion comprises a range from red to near-orange. But the very reason that teams choose colors, is to distinguish them from their opponents. Since variations of red and white are, by far, the most common college colors, we need to distinguish ourselves from other teams. Vermilion is unique to UL; it is important that we define our unique color... well, uniquely.

So by placing UL's vermilion exactly between red and orange, so that it is not clearly either color, we can capitalize upon, and promote, our unique color as both a trademark and a school identifier.

Bright orange-red is also an appropriate color to reflect our culture. There are a large number of distinctive icons in Cajun culture that are orange-red: boiled crabs, tabasco peppers, crawfish bisque, ripe tomatoes, old barns, rusty tin roofs, new fiddles, piléed brick, azaleas, and even the wild swamp iris Iris nelsonii, named for the late UL faculty member Ira Nelson.

UL's colors are vermilion and white. Every school in the country uses white, so that's a problem. Fortunately, vermilion is unique to UL. As our school color, it seems to me that we only have three choices for vermilion.

We can use it.

We can change it.

Or we can lie.