The story

“Maybe Purple”. It took me a while to come up with a name for my company, because you don’t want to claim to be good at languages, only to call yourself something cringingly cliché like “Word for Word” or “Between the Lines”. Ugh!

And then I thought of my gran.

Grandma loves to paint. Brush in hand, flecks of oil paint in her hair, she’s always blending colours with the best of them—leafy greens, sunset oranges and the deepest blue of midnight. But there is one colour grandma is fond of that is a complete mystery: MAUVE.

For years, grandma has been calling things “mauve”. A fuchsia cardigan: “Oh my, I love your mauve outfit!” A grey-blue flower: “Isn’t that the cutest mauve bloom?” A soft-pink wallpaper: “I redecorated the room in mauve, it goes well with the sofa.”

There was never any rhyme or reason to her use of the word mauve. In fact, the mystery of this colour vexed me as much as the dilemma of finding a catchy company name!

In the end, I decided to let grandma’s mauve keep all its wonderful nuances. Instead of pinning it down to just one word, I’m going to say mauve is… maybe purple.

As a translator and editor, I want to help you find all the synonyms in the world. To sprinkle you with the contents of a thesaurus, until we find that one word that is exactly right for you. For grandma, it’s mauve. What will it be for you?