雙語：爲何信箋紙是黃色的？

Why Are Legal pads Yellow?

爲什麼信箋是黃色的？

The legal pad got its start with Thomas Holley in 1888. Holley was 24 and working at a paper mill in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Every day, he and his co-workers threw out a lot of scrap pieces, called sortings, left over from cutting paper into the right sized sheets. He knew there had to be a use for them and eventually hit on the idea of cutting the sortings to the same size and binding them into small notepads. Since the paper was essentially trash to the mill, they could sell the pads at low prices.

1888年，Thomas Holley創造了信箋。24歲的他在馬薩諸塞州霍利約克的一家造紙廠工作。每天他和同事們都會扔掉很多被稱爲“邊角餘料”的廢料，這些廢料是將紙張切成合適大小的尺寸後剩下的部分。他知道它們一定有用武之地，最終想到了一個好點子，就是把這些“邊角餘料”切成統一尺寸並裝訂成記事本。因爲這些紙張對造紙廠來說就是垃圾，所以他們可以以很低的價格出售這種小本子。

The first few batches of pads sold so well that Holley quit his job at the mill and started his own company—Ampad, or the American Pad and Paper Company—to collect scraps from the local mills and manufacture and sell his pads. His company still exists, and they still manufacture notepads in a variety of sizes and shapes. And colors.

最初的幾批記事本賣得非常好，以至於Holley辭去了造紙廠的工作，成立了自己的公司Ampad（即美國記事本及紙業公司），從當地造紙廠收集廢料後，生產、銷售小記事本。這家公司目前仍然存在，仍在生產各種大小和形狀，還有不同顏色的記事本。

The pads that Holley made probably weren't yellow, and that isn't the only color they come in today. The only thing that technically sets the legal pad apart from every other notepad is the 1.25-inch, left-side "down lines," or margins. According to a historical deep-dive on legal pads in a 2005 issue of Legal Affairs magazine, Holley added these lines "in the early 1900s at the request of a local judge who was looking for space to comment on his own notes."

Holley最初生產的記事本可能不是黃色的，且黃色也不是現在記事本的唯一顏色。從技術上講，唯一能將信箋與其他記事本區別開來的是紙張左側1.25英寸的“劃線”，即頁邊空白。根據2005年出版的《法律事務》雜誌上的一篇關於信箋歷史的深度報道，Holley在“20世紀初應一位當地法官的請求”加上了這些線，“這位法官想讓自己的筆記有做批註的地方”。

Still, when most people think legal pad, they think of the classic yellow paper and blue lines. The true origin of the yellow hue is actually a mystery. As far as we know, Holley's pads were white pads, and dyeing them yellow would have upped his cost and ruined his business plan.

不過，當大多數人想到便箋時，他們想到的就是經典的黃紙藍線。黃色色調的真正起源實際上是一個謎。據我們所知，Holley的信箋是白色的，如果把它們染成黃色會增加他的成本，進而破壞他的商業計劃。

There are a few competing hypotheses about how the pads came to be yellow later on, but none can be verified and no one seems to know when the pads first came out in color. One origin story suggests that yellow contrasted well against black ink without glare, making text easier to read. Or, that from a psychological perspective, "yellow is an excellent color for stimulating mental activity," so writing on yellow notepads could boost your creativity or clarity.

關於信箋後來是如何變成黃色的，有一些假說都很有道理，但沒有一個能夠得到證實，似乎也沒有人知道信箋是什麼時候開始變成黃色的。一個說法是，黃色與不反光的黑色墨水形成了極好的對比，這讓閱讀文本變得更容易。或者，從心理學的角度來看，“黃色是刺激精神活動的絕佳顏色”，所以在黃色信箋上寫字可以激發你的創造力或思辨力。

Another possibility is that Holley or his successors eventually decided to dye the paper to hide the fact that the pads were made from scraps of varying age and quality, and yellow was the cheapest or most readily available dye at the time.

另一種可能性是，Holley或他的繼任者最終決定將紙張染色，以掩蓋信箋紙是由不同年代和質量的邊角餘料製成的事實，而黃色是當時最便宜或最易得的染料。

翻譯：MS小冰晶