Colour is having a moment.

The pink – or is it magenta? – bus got the Labour Party in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, while 50 shades of grey is inflaming passions across the board, whether it's those who have been eagerly awaiting the film or those who can hardly believe the thrall of such a badly written book with a thin and dubious plot.

In the shops, meanwhile, the never-ending cycle of colour shorthand is in full swing: January's clean white gave way to the red and pink of Valentine's Day commerce, which now has been swept aside for the pastel palette of Easter.

Colour has long played an important role in political and social life, but its associations change in different cultures and over time.

The Sumptuary Laws of Elizabethan times, for example, are said to have dictated which wardrobe colours were suitable for whom to impose frugality and to keep a tight rein on social status.

And then there is the (somewhat disputed) claim that pink was the colour of choice for baby boys around the turn of the century.

Any vestiges of that trend have since been blown away by the force of commerce.

One (upmarket, US-based) baby clothes online retailer even claims it was “born out of the frustration of buying uninspired gender neutral gifts” and goes on to reassure buyers that they won't have to “settle” for yellows and greens again. Laughable though this is, it shows how consumerism tramples over any argument that this superficial classification of boys and girls encourages deeper ones, with destructive implications to the flourishing of identity.

Pink to a film-maker friend of mine has long held quite another meaning: for her, it's the colour of Sunday.

She's one of the four per cent of all people – most of them in creative vocations – for whom senses overlap and blend inseparably.

There are lots of variations on the theme, sounds might have a taste or a shape, letters a colour, but it's all called synaesthesia.

It's considered a neurological condition which makes it sound bad, like a disease, but it's not.

In fact, scientists are trying to learn more about how it might be cultivated among the 96 per cent of us with more one-dimensional senses, as a way of countering memory loss.

If you think about it, those for whom letters are associated with colours and sounds have a built-in way of remembering words that is independent of their meaning.

How useful is that?

Now that's some colour shorthand we could do with – more of that please.