When you’re feeling “in the pink”, that means you’re in excellent health and feeling fine. In his 1923 novel Inimitable Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse used it this way:
“‘I am in excellent health, I thank you. And you?’ ‘In the pink. Just been over to America.’”
The first one to use “pink” in this sense was Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet:
“Why, I am the very pinke of curtesie.”
But why are people talking about a color that way? It’s because “pink” didn’t originally mean a color. It was a flower with notches in its petals, and “pink” is a very old word meaning to cut or notch. That sense is still around in one specialized sense; in sewing you can use “pinking shears,” which cut fabric with notched edges so it won’t fray. It was the flower that led to the two additional meanings of “pink” — in the 1500s in Europe it was for some reason the flower. It was so popular that the word acquired the meaning of “the best” of some quality. Nowadays “in the pink” is mostly used to refer to health, but Shakespeare’s application of “pink” to “courtesy” is more typical of usage at that time. You could be “the pink of rowers” if you were a champion boatman, and if you had the best boat it would be “the pink of watercraft.”.
Using “pink” to refer to a light red color turns out to be its most recent meaning; it didn’t really enter usage in that sense until the 1800s. And sure enough, that meaning comes from the flower too. Those popular petals? They were pink (notched) and also pink (the color). In light of the varied history of “pink,” which comes from time when Europe went nuts in spades for a flower and it almost acquired meanings in droves, you’d expect anyone who likes words to be in the tank for “pink”.
But hang on a sec, you can be “in the pink,” “in the tank,” and things can be “in spades” and “in droves”? That little set of “container phrases” (“container” because something is in them) are all pretty interesting.
“In the tank” nowadays means to be completely committed to something; when the first President Bush said about an opponent: “…he’s in the tank for them,” what he meant by “them” wasan interest group (trial lawyers, in that case). But “in the tank” changed its meaning somewhat. The phrase originated in boxing, where “going in the tank” meant pretending to get knocked down in order to lose a fight on purpose. It was commonly used in the early 20th century to mean losing on purpose. It wasn’t until about the 1970s that it shed its connection with intentionally losing and kept only the sense of being so committed to something or someone that you could never be dissuaded.
If you have something “in spades,” it means you have a whole lot of it. This phrase also comes from the early 20th century, specifically the 1920s when the card game bridge became hugely popular. The best cards to have in bridge are spades, because they’re the highest rank. If you had a good combination of cards “in spades” then you were likely to win (I guess). The phrase “in spades” probably comes from the abundance of points you can expect if you have those cards.
Having something “in droves” is pretty close to having it “in spades.” “Drove” is just a form of the verb “to drive,” as in “she drove the car”. But before there were cars, there were other things to drive, like herds of sheep or cattle. In the 1100s, a shepherd might talk about how he drove his sheep to the pasture. And by the 1200s, a big flock of sheep or herd of cattle came to be called a “drove.” “Drove” came to mean a large number of anything, not just farm animals — and by the 1800s usage had evolved to the point that it is today, when if you have a large number of things, you have it “in droves.” And that might mean your collection is in the pink.
The title quote comes from the Pixar short film Boundin’ by Bud Luckey.
