PopVocab: Vocabulary at the Nail Salon
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.