Stocking

[jpestaina]

What is the colour word used with the word 'stocking' meaning to be quite clever?

[Sequin]

Blue

[Quizmonster]

It applies only to women, however.

[brachiopod]

I can honestly say I've never heard this expression before! How is it used? (I mean can you give me a context).

[Octavius]

see here:

http://www.assumption.edu/whw/bluest_stockings.html

[cook1254]

Years ago children who were sent to certain public schools had to pass an entrance exam. Most of these establishments had as part of their uniforms, Blue stockings. Hence the term blue stocking meaning to be intelligent.

[brachiopod]

aar, I see now. Cheers guys.

[Kingaroo]

Not quite, Cook1254. According to Word Mavens (or Random House):

Bluestocking, a disparaging and rather old-fashioned term for 'an intellectual or literary woman', has nothing to do with the blues, the puritans, or blue blood. In the middle of the 18th century there was a group of ladies in London who replaced the usual evenings of card-playing and gossip with more intellectual pursuits. Copying the literary salons of Paris, they held "conversations" to which illustrious men of letters such as Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, and Horace Walpole were invited. On one occasion, the society invited Benjamin Stillingfleet, a botanist and poet. When he replied that he was too poor to afford the black silk stockings that were part of the formal attire for the evening, the women kindly told him that he would be welcome in his informal day clothes � which included blue worsted stockings.

The husband of one of the attendees began derisively referring to the group as the "Blue-Stocking Society" and to those who attended as the "Blue Stockingers." That's one version. In his Life of Johnson Boswell gives another: "Such was the excellence of his [Stillingfleet's] conversation, that his absence was felt as so great a loss, that it used to be said 'We can do nothing without the blue stocking,' and thus by degrees the title was established." The women proudly took over the name and called themselves the Bluestockings or Bas bleu.