Here’s something a prodigious lexicon is good for — naming nail polish colors when you’ve got 55 shades of “pink.”

If you are wont to frequent nail salons, you may have noticed that many of the color names involve puns (and often are not terribly descriptive of the color they purport to represent): Tart Deco, Lapis of Luxury, Pinking Up the Pieces, and my favorite … Sand of a Beach.

A few color names, however — currently in the Essie line — sport more erudite names containing GRE vocabulary words:

Demure Vixen

Demure means “characterized by shyness and modesty; reserved.” Culturally, demure is almost always used to describe women. A word that also means “reserved” and is often used to describe men is staid.

Interestingly, demure can also mean “affectedly or coyly decorous, sober, or sedate” — that is, faking being shy and reserved as a flirtation strategy. That makes more sense when paired with vixen, a female fox or what the dictionary describes as “an ill-tempered or quarrelsome woman,” a usage that has since fallen out of fashion. Vixen is often used in a fashion and pop culture context to describe a femme fatale or audaciously appealing woman. (This word is a bit too sexy for the GRE, though).

Vermillionaire

What a keen pun! Vermillion is a bright red to reddish-orange color.

Going Incognito

Incognito means undercover: “having one’s identity concealed, as under an assumed name, especially to avoid notice or formal attentions.”

Incognito shares the root cog (to know) with many words relating to knowledge, such as cogent, cognition, cognitive, cognizant, and reconnaissance.

From the UK’s Daily Mail:

Scotch isn’t just a drink! It’s also a verb!

Scotch means “to put a definite end to; crush; stamp out; foil,” as in to scotch a rumor; to scotch a plan.

Scotch can also mean “to injure so as to make harmless” or “to cut, gash, or score.”

Of course, the score being used in that definition is the one that means “to make (cuts, lines, etc) in or on” or “to record by making notches in” — for instance, you might score a door frame with a penknife as a cute way of recording a child’s height as he or she grows.

Some words similar in meaning to scotch:

• Quash
• Quell
• Squelch
• Stymie
• Thwart

I was going to wrap your entire house in toilet paper, but the rainstorm scotched my plans.

The show Glee has recently resurrected this 1999 Destiny’s Child hit:

Did you notice the GRE word audacity?

And now you ask to use my car
Drive it all day and don’t fill up the tank
And you have the audacity
To even come and step to me
And ask to hold some money from me
Until you get your check next week

Audacity means “boldness or daring, especially with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.” That is, audacity can be good or bad, depending on the context and on one’s perspective. Here, the man in question has “arrogant disregard” for politeness, reciprocity, and the conventions of romantic relationships, as seen by the speaker.

The speaker also calls her paramour a “trifling, good for nothing type of brother.” Another word for trifling is nugatory, “of no real value; trifling; worthless.”

It also seems that the hapless lover is guilty of cadging. To cadge is to obtain by imposing on another’s generosity or friendship, borrow without intent to repay, or beg or obtain by begging.

You’re slowly making me pay for things
Your money should be handling.

Sounds manipulative! It seems like this guy is a champion cadger, and that his answer to the question “Can you pay my automo’bills?” is certain to be an unsatisfying one.

This week’s meme has been a fatuous music video by previously unknown thirteen year old Rebecca Black. The video, “Friday,” has been called “the worst song ever written.” See for yourself!

Fatuous means “foolish or inane, especially in an unconscious, complacent manner; silly.”

Here is an excerpt from the lyrics:

7am, waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal

Wow, isn’t that inane? (Lacking sense, significance, or ideas?) I might also call it insipid (without distinctive, interesting, or stimulating qualities). Here’s more:

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

A lot of the insipidity or fatuity of the song has to do with the fact that the lyrics are so very mundane (or pedestrian). You have to have cereal before you go to the bus stop? Really? Is picking a seat in the car totally blowing your mind?

This song is so very bad that some might call it a travesty of modern pop music. A travesty is “a literary or artistic composition so inferior in quality as to be merely a grotesque imitation of its model.”

Yesterday was Thursday
Today it is Friday
We we we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards

Really? She tells us the days of the week? In chronological order? (Well, better than alphabetical order, I guess).

Because the song is so hilariously bad, it is spawned a number of parodies, or satirical imitations. Here is one lampoon of Black’s song:

Just when you thought nothing could get more fatuous, inane, insipid or vapid than “Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes afterwards,” this parody manages to lampoon those very utilitarian lyrics with, “Friday happens on Friday.”

PopEater recently ran this post about Charlie Sheen’s very public meltdown.

Notice the word turpitude. Turpitude means depravity, baseness of character, or corrupt or depraved acts. It is often used in the phrase “moral turpitude,” a legal term that describes depraved behavior.

Worried about her grandson’s turpitude – as evinced by his constant detentions and a three-day stay in a juvenile jail – Mrs. Worthington offered to pay for military school.

It’s hard to fathom the kind of turpitude required to make a movie that could get banned in modern-day Europe! When I read the screenplay, I nearly threw up.

Three related words are:

Base – morally low, mean, dishonorable; of little or no value; crude and unrefined; counterfeit

Debase – lower or reduce in quality or dignity

…and, of course, depraved, meaning morally bad, corrupt, or perverted.

Now, take a look at the use of turpitude in the Sheen article:

Do you spot the problem?

Turpitude is a bad thing. Sheen certainly wasn’t fired for a lack of it — he was fired for turpitude itself. Perhaps we could say he was fired for a surfeit of turpitude.

Anyone want to start a band called Surfeit of Turpitude?