👉 Okay, let’s tackle the wonderfully peculiar and frankly rather unnerving concept of… being "purple-sided." Now, before you immediately reach for a thesaurus to dredge up something suitably frightful, let me assure you: no, we aren't actually describing a new species of badger.
Essentially—and I stress, essentially—being purple-sided is a phrase that emerged largely from the wonderfully weird corners of early 20th and mid-late 1980s American splatterpunk and vaguely goth subcultures. You wouldn’t find it in a medical diagnostic, of course. Instead, you'd stumble upon this unsettling descriptor when describing someone—typically a young man—who was perceived as intensely disturbed, emotionally unavailable, and maybe, just maybe, harbouring the faint whiff of something profoundly unwell beneath a carefully constructed veneer of nonchalance. Think about it! Purple itself is already a complicated colour, right? It's neither wholly blue, nor entirely red. There's this… bruised, almost melancholy quality to it. When you add the prefix of being "purple-sided," as if the purple isn’t just on them, but radiating outwards from their very essence – it suggests a sickness that isn’t immediately visible, something festering beneath the surface and colouring their entire outlook. Essentially, they weren't just sad; they were a little… violet-tinged in their whole being. It was about an
