Asanga

In case anyone finds this post looking for answers to the same question, I’m going to answer my own question:

It is very simple to create a child theme. The instructions for doing so are here:

http://themeshaper.com/2009/04/17/wordpress-child-theme-basics/

Thank you Ian Stewart. The only other trick is finding the “offending” attribute within the hierarchy of CSS, so that you know what you need to over-ride. That’s easy too once you know the secret:

right-click, then “q” in Firefox will open up a CSS inspector that will locate the relevant styles applied to whatever element you clicked on.

In my case I found an RBG code for a dark shade of grey text that was the default for all body text. One thing that threw me off was that the same or similar shade of grey was defined elsewhere as a hex code, so I was primed to look for the hex code which blinded me to the RGB code.