👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little bit of English, then! Now, when I say something is described as, frankly... "blue barred," we absolutely, positively, and with a very slight twitch of my unreasonably amused eyebrow—need to unpack what that actually
means
.
Essentially, a blue barred thing… isn't just blue. It’s blue, yes! But the blue is, rather dramatically, divided into a bunch of sharp, rectangular sections. Think a very stylish, and slightly disturbed, badger, but instead of fur, he has solid swathes of an aggressively cheerful, almost offensively bright blue. These blue stripes—these are the bars . Historically (and here's where it gets weird), this whole concept really sprung from old-world heraldry – those fancy coats of arms for the really stuffy old guys in charge. Blue barred meant you were probably involved in a very complicated, probably slightly underhanded, and almost certainly politically charged land grab. Nowadays, we mostly see it in… frankly, rather odd things. Think certain breeds of antique rocking horses, some disturbingly lifelike porcelain ducks. Occasionally you'll even find a blue barred postage stamp! The whole effect is... jarring. It suggests a sort of rigid, almost bureaucratic disapproval. You feel as if the blue itself is being carefully compartmentalised into a very unhappy arrangement. There’s an unsettling insistence on order, and frankly, it probably implies that
