Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about blue idioms and then about the difference between being plum out of something and getting a plum job assignment. In this segment, we'll take a look at phrases that use the color blue.

First up is politics. These days in the United States, we hear about red states and blue states,

where red refers to states that reliably vote for Republicans, and blue refers to states that

reliably vote for Democrats. But these designations are newer than you might think.

Labeling the states with such partisan colors began with the TV station NBC,

the first all-color network in 1976.

The anchor explained how states that voted for the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, were going to be blue, and those in favor of the Democratic challenger, Jimmy Carter, would be red, the opposite of how we think of it today.

In subsequent elections, other TV stations adopted their own color schemes. No official standard was adopted, however, so the

public became confused. It wasn't until the hotly contested 2000 presidential election that red

came to definitively mean Republican, and blue came to definitively mean Democratic, both in

political discourse and on TV. Number two on our

list is blue in the face. When someone does something until she is blue in the face, she's feeling

frustrated and exasperated. For example, a mother can tell her slovenly son to clean up his room

until she is blue in the face.

Unfortunately, in this case, the room will probably stay messy.

The meaning of blue in this expression originates in medicine.

When you're deprived of oxygen, such as when talking breathlessly or angrily, your skin turns blueish.

Our third phrase or expression containing the color blue

refers to money. The phrase blue chip, as in blue chip stocks,

refers to large, well-established companies that are likely to be household names

and to pay dividends to stockholders.

Examples are the cereal maker General Mills and the shipping company United Parcel Service.

...