IS HUE A FOSSIL?
Nothing fossilizes faster in the brain than sounds, the sounds of a language. The brain refuses to let new sounds in and adapts them to the existing, fossilized "native" ones. This is also true of words. John Simpson , former Editor in Chief of the OED , writes in his The Word Detective : "Hue is a fossil nowadays. That means that it does not have a life of its own anymore and is only found in set phrases which we just repeat with little concept of their original meaning." Black will take no other hue ( sobre negro no hay tintura ), hue and cry ( gritos, griterío, alboroto ) are two good examples. Hue may be a fossil, a word hardly used nowadays, that parasitizes other words in ready-made sentences. Phraseology does not mind words, but a collection of words with a set meaning, independent of those individual words. The mystery and challenge of phraseology, and idioms, lies here: individual words matter not although they have a life of their own, with a meaning of th...