A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
bluing
The blue that appears where certain mushrooms are cut, handled, or bruised — sometimes within seconds, sometimes over minutes, ranging from a faint slate wash to an ink-dark stain that spreads out from a thumbprint. It happens in a great many boletes and in the psilocybin species, and it is one of the standard things a mycologist checks by deliberately damaging a specimen and waiting.
Etymology
English, from blue plus the -ing of a process — a verbal noun for a color arriving, in the same family as reddening and greening. Mycology borrowed a word that already had two working lives: bluing was the laundry additive, a trace of blue pigment added to wash water to cancel yellowing in white linen, and it was also the controlled oxide finish put on gun steel and clock hands. All three are the same idea — blue as something that develops on a surface rather than something applied to it.