Indigo is the color of writing a blog, giving a presentation on the “3 ways to”, explaining the “7 tips how to”. Indigo resonates when you add depth to your words with structure, knowledge, and rich vocabulary.  Indigo can be your hook and anchor. You hook your audience’s curiosity by promising knowledge and deep content and then anchor your speech with structure.

Audiences love words and are eager to hear new ways of expressing things. If you use a thesaurus, or know how to spell that word, you already like indigo. Good speechwriters get better by reaching deep into dictionaries, encyclopedias, Wikipedia and other sources of knowledge. Rhetorical devices like alliteration, metaphor, simile are indigo as is wordplay like puns, rhymes, acronyms (including inventing silly expressions from existing acronyms which is an overused but effective comic tool) and jargon.

Indigo is unemotional. Indigo is the color of logic, intellect, management, business speeches, and presentations. PowerPoint is indigo. Yet indigo does not mean boring. The great American comedian George Carlin loved to use indigo. If you don’t mind some EXTREMELY crude language you can watch his highly intellectual and funny  Seven words you can’t say on TV sketch. (Note for indigo intellectuals and those afraid to watch the real sketch – clicking on the title will take you to Wikipedia page devoted to the historic significance of this sketch which give you lots of indigo depth to read). Carlin shows us how to make a list humorous and connect with the audience in this classic exposition of his deep knowledge of blue words. What’s a blue word? Here’s an indigo definition from the Cambridge Dictionary:

A blue word is a curse word; a string of curse words may be said to make the air blue. A blue joke is a dirty one (off-color, so to speak), a blue movie is pornographic.

Watch below and notice George even wore an indigo shirt.

To recap: Indigo is the color of deep knowledge and vocabulary. Indigo comes from structure, organization, knowledge, mastery of subject, intellect, logic, wordplay, rhetorical and transitional devices. Indigo is unemotional information found in presentations, management, numbers, heirarchy of ideas, “seven ways to”, “three-point strategy for”, lists, dictionaries, the thesaurus, Wikipedia.