The following blog entry was written by Debbie Nevins, Executive Editor of www.weeklyreader.com.

Sometimes we can get a poor innocent word all wrong.

Being a writer, it goes without saying that I love words. But I’ll say it anyway: I love words. That doesn’t mean I loved vocabulary quizzes when I was a kid—anymore than you probably do. Memorizing words for a vocab test commits that knowledge to your short-term memory. Once the test is over, you quickly forget it. All those excellent words just fall right out of your brain, dribble out your ears, and then vanish into thin air. You can’t blame your teacher for trying though. A good vocabulary is a great thing. The way to really remember words is to use them—say them, write them, read them.

But here’s the funny thing. Sometimes you can inadvertently attach the wrong meaning to a word and it settles all comfy into your long-term memory. You go through life using the poor word incorrectly. For most of my life I thought the word puce described a nasty, mustard yellow-green, vomit color. I was wrong. Puce is a color, but it’s a brownish purple. Or a dark grayish-purple. Or a dark red—even dictionaries don’t agree on what puce is, so I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad.

But still, how could I make such a mistake? Probably I was subconsciously associating puce with puke and putrid and pus.

On a related note, as long as we’re in the P-U section of the dictionary, I always thought the word pulchritude meant … well, I wasn’t sure what it meant. Something like … disgustingness. If pulchritude (that’s PUHL-kreh-tude) was on a multiple-choice vocab test and the answers were A. hideousness, B. stupidity, and C. physical beauty, I would have a hard time deciding whether to choose A. or B. Of course, the answer is C. Pulchritude means physical beauty. Go figure.

All of which begs the question: what is the name of that nasty, mustard yellow-green, vomit color? If it’s not puce, what is it?

Pssst: Come back tomorrow for a special Halloween edition of word misidentification…