Paint the Town Red: How an Idiom Traveled Two Centuries

The phrase paint the town red began with an English aristocrat's undocumented antics in the 1830s and eventually named a Doja Cat song on the album Scarlet. This episode is a linguistic archaeological dig tracing how a sequence of words mutates across eras and mediums.We follow the idiom from Henry Beresford, the Marquess of Waterford, through 1980s Danish pop and 2000s rock compilations to modern video games and pop albums.How the original inciting incident behind the phrase was lost to history while the words survivedWhy the visual metaphor of the color red let the idiom survive translation into Danish in 1989Bands like the Mahones and Delirious using the phrase as branding shorthand in the 2000sThe reliteralization of the metaphor in a 2021 first-person combat video gameDoja Cat placing the phrase on Scarlet, using the color as connective tissue for the project