No More Waity, Katie

Charming. Prince Charming. Finally a nail polish marketed to the enormous audience who have already knit their own royal wedding, hooked up their Kate and William commemorative refrigerator, and are just twitching to spend their extra crumpet money. Of course, the polish will not be sold in the U.K., and it won't be shipped out until May, post-wedding frenzy, so…good luck with that.


Now, I like a good bit of rhyming doggerel as much as the next McGonagall fan, but "No More Waity, Katie"? Really? First of all, I'm pretty sure she goes by "Kate." And, call me crazy, but I can't seem to find "waity" anywhere in my copy of the O.E.D. You will note, however, that the actual word "wait" rhymes with her actual name, "Kate." So apparently someone just decided to add extra syllables and take up more space on the bottle to...make both parts worse? Yes, I know that "Waity Katie" is one of Kate Middleton's tabloid nicknames. So I could potentially (albeit with serious questions about how wise it is to emulate such fine literary sources as the Sun) let "No More Waity Katie" slide. That said, grammatically-challenged nail polish namer, consider the role of a comma. "Waity Katie," qua nickname, makes a certain amount of tenuous grammatical sense, in that the -y is a slapdash adjective-maker, thus she is a Katie with a proclivity towards waiting. "No More Waity, Katie," however, means that you are addressing the future Queen of England in baby talk. I hope you have an immunity to Corgi bites.

Substantively, of course, it is always great to have more cultural reinforcement that a woman's role is to exert feminine wiles and wait passively for a man to choose her. Thanks, Jerky Turkey.

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Bitches Brew

SCENE I. A cavern. In the middle, a boiling nail polish bottle.


Thunder. Enter the three Bitches.

First Bitch
Thrice I've backstabbed my best friend.
Second Bitch
Thrice and once today I've whined.
Third Bitch
I am SO bored--'Tis time, 'tis time.
First Bitch
Round about the bottle go;
Add like, whatever, I don't know.
Eye of newt; some blood of ducks;
That should be good for sixteen bucks.
Looks kind of dirty, but don't panic;
Charge extra--call the brand organic.
ALL
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Bitch
The bottle's full of our creation,
No more room for punctuation;
Forget the tired, trite, possessive,
"Bitches Brew"'s much more expressive.
We brew a lot besides just potions:
Moisturizers, perfumes, lotions.
You know it takes more than a wand
To get Three's tacky cauldron-blonde.
ALL
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Third Bitch
So anyway, that lame Macbeth,
Let's bring him to an early death.
He's so not hunky, and that wife!
Your hands are clean--please get a life!
After we've got him in our thrall
We'll head out to the nearest mall.
My jeans have been untimely ripp'd,
And for Bitch One, I've got a reason:
Your black cat is SO last season.
Bitch Two, you'll never catch a thane
Til Birnam wood reach Dunsinane.

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Up's

Great, just what we all needed: dadaist nail polish. What is "up's" with this?


Actually, I'm kind of impressed. Who would have thought so much confusion could be packed into just three letters and one punctuation mark? In terms of nonsense per character this little number is compressed like [normals] Kim Kardashian's posterior in this dress [nerds] a ZIP file stored on the world's tiniest USB drive and thrown into Garbage Compactor 3263827 on the Death Star.

What exactly happened to cause this name? Was the author trying to go to the United Parcel Service's website to see when they would deliver her new keyboard without an erratically triggering caps lock and apostrophe key? Was she hoping to launch her career as a film critic by naming a nail polish after the first word of her thesis, titled "Up's Balloons: Intelligent Falling: a Metatextual Metaphorical Metaphysical Metallurgical Critique of Gravity"?

Whatever is going on here, this name is not exactly at the top's of my list. Not exactly one of Essie's high'slights.

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Mutt's New

Dear Mrs. Atkinson,

Here is my essay on "A Day in the Life of Your Pet" like you assigned. I am really sorry it is late but when I was looking for Tinkerbell to do my research I found her floating upside down in the hot tub and my mom said she was just sun tanning but then I heard her talking to the vet and he said she had "lost the will to live" or something.

P.S. Is it OK if I don't go to Six Flags for Physics Day this Friday? Rollercoasters and physics both kind of make me nauseous and I think if I combine them I might end up ruining my new outfit in front of everybody.

A Day in the Life of TINKERBELL, the BEST Chihuahua EVER!

YAWN. Just another morning waking up in my big pink bed! I love it because it is shaped like a castle and it makes me feel like a real princess. Now it's time to take a walk! My owner is too busy to go walk and also she is scared of maybe breaking a heel but that's OK because I get to see Manuelo, my extra-special friend, who was hired just to take care of me! Hi Manuelo! You smell extra good today. Did you know smell is my strongest sense and I can smell way better than a human? For instance, I can tell you are in a sad mood because you smell like cheap whiskey! Did my owner threaten to report you to ICE again because she thought you stole my diamond tiara? I really miss it, diamonds are a girl's best friend!

Time to go see what my owner is doing! Wow, she looks really happy to see me. She's running right over! What's that she has in her hand?


(spotting credit to Gustav Berg)

It looks like the little bottle I saw Manuelo taking from owner's daddy's Happy Cabinet but it doesn't smell the same. It smells really strong though, I wonder what's inside? No, it's too strong, don't put it so close to me!

What are you doing? You're putting it on me? Stop telling me how beautiful I'm going to look, these are fierce talons! Let me go, Manuelo, don't let her do this to me!

You keep saying that my nails are going to look so pretty, but are you are aware that dogs are basically friggin' colorblind? It is THEORETICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for me to appreciate this.

Why are you doing this to me? I'm sorry I peed on your couch! I'm sorry! Just let me go.

Life is agony.

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Baby It's "Coal" Outside!

Really? This was the nail polish you were so excited about that you busted out the exclamation point?

(photo from Nail Polish Diva)

Here's an idea: if you only have enough currency at the Punctuation Store to pick out one present for yourself, how about investing in a comma? I know, it doesn't have the flash of an exclamation point, but the upside is that you will look a lot less like an idiot, with the pleasant side-effect of being grammatically correct.

Oh, and thanks for the quotation marks around "coal." I was in danger of believing that, in a bizarre and terrifying sequel to Cat's Cradle, the carbon in our atmosphere had literally transmuted into sedimentary rock and was in danger of crushing anyone who ventured outside. ("Yes," Steampunk Santa said, as he unleashed the particle of Coal-9, "you've all been very bad.") The thing is, I know what it would be like to have coal outside. I don't, however, know what it would be like to have to worry about "coal." What exactly are the scare quotes supposed to indicate? Something kind of like coal is outside? Watch out, it's sandstone! Oh, no, here comes whale blubber, another non-renewable source of energy!

I assure you, if you persist in saying things like this, you will soon have nobody left to call "baby."

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Skinny Dip'n in Lake Michg'n

Let's start by getting this out of the way: even skinny dipping in Lake Michigan is a bad idea. It is filthy and freezing cold and shares a border with (shudder) Indiana. This is without even getting to the giant squid.

Luckily, I guess whoever wears this nail polish doesn't have to worry about any of that, because there is no possible combination of letters that can fill in these apostrophes to make them result in an intelligible phrase, let alone anything that bears a passing resemblance to "Skinny Dipping in Lake Michigan." I guess "Dip'n" could be short for "Diphenylhydantoin" (a white, slightly water-soluble powder, C15H11N2O2, used in the form of its sodium salt to prevent or arrest convulsions in epilepsy), "Dipnoan" (belonging or pertaining to the order Dipnoi, comprising the lungfishes), or "Dipthongization" (the act of changing into a diphthong). "Michg'n"? I've got nothing. Or should I say "nothin'"? Or "nothn'g"?

And while we're at it, why are there even apostrophes at all? It's not like brevity can be a big concern with this Tolstoy of a nail polish name. Are they trying to go for a rhyme here? Because I'm not a pro at pronouncing words that look like they come from an Elvish ballad, but I'm pretty sure that no matter how brutalized these words get, it does not work. I tried a few times and it started coming out "Skinny Dippin' with Prince Myshkin," an uninviting prospect but still one I would prefer to putting on this nail polish.

Let me just conclude by saying I hope whoever came up with this name dies torn into tiny shreds by a horde of rabid lexicographers.

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How Cute Is That?

I admit it, I kind of fell off the Stupid Nail Polish Names bandwagon. I used up all the stupidly-named nail polish that I have sitting on my dresser, the ones I have a personal sense of outrage about. I began to wonder--is my calling fulfilled?

But today my little sister dragged me to Sephora, and I realized: there are wrongs that must be righted. These outrages against humanity may not be allowed to stand, and it is my duty to fight them. With my last breath, I will decry these horrendous sins:


(photo taken from Lextard's Flickr)

You know, life can be rough. It's hard to keep your confidence up when confronted with picture after picture of airbrushed starlets, and I'm certainly not immune from insecurity. Sometimes I ask myself: Am I really smart enough? Funny enough? Pretty enough? And I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of this from my friends. "No, that dress just makes you look zaftig! Chubby at most." "I guess you do look a little like Bela Lugosi, but in a good way." "Of COURSE you'll find love! I saw a whole website where people pay every month to look at pictures of people just like you."

But here's who I'm not willing to buy the worms for on their little compliment fishing trip: my NAIL POLISH.

"How Cute Is That?" How insecure is the person who came up with this? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the answer to my question is greater than the answer to theirs. You would think that after this shade got passed by the Nail Polish Color Committee it would have some resolution about how cute it feels. I doubt that the other nail polishes take kindly to it, either. "What an attention whore," they whisper. "She's just flashing her question mark at anybody who walks by." If I am going to get a cocky nail polish, I at least want one that's upfront about it. "Cute Carnation" or "I'm Awesome Now Purchase Me" or something.

If people buy you, you're cute enough, OK? Now go take off some of that shimmer. You look like a tramp.

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