You have to know whether you're talking about a bulldog or something else.

"I like the color blue," expresses a categorical preference without any 
determinative context.

"I like the blue color," is what one might say when looking, say, at 
several shirts, all of the same style but in different colors.


stein wrote:
> In one of the forums for English Teachers, a teacher wrote:
>
>
> One of my students wrote "I like the blue color"...and I corrected this to
>
> "I like the color blue."
>
> But why, I do not know...any exlanations for this? Why does the adjective
>
> follow the noun here??
>
>
> I found the following explanation:
>
> According to the book ABC of Common Grammatica Errors by Nigel D Turton
> Macmillan Heinemann Publishers Ltd. 1995, the explanation to this question
> is:
>
> Color is not normally used after blue, yellow, red, etc. We use color 
> after
> a color name only when we are trying to describe a color which is a 
> mixture,
> e.g. "The head and beak of the king parrot are an orangy-red color."
>
> Does anyone have any other explanation?
>
> Dalia Stein
> Beit Berl College, Israel

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