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.

Charlie Dickens

When I saw that Butter London had all kinds of fun colors without the "Big Three" nail polish carcinogens, I had great expectations. Now, I know these are hard times, and fourteen dollars is a lot to spend on a bottle of nail polish. But when I saw that they were giving away free nail polish for Earth Day, I was hooked. I've been stuck in my bleak house studying so much that I feel like Oliver Twist, and this was a chance for welcome escapism. I started browsing the list over and over, pondering which I would pick. Someone asked me if I was at least going to get a Stupid Nail Polish Names entry out of it, and I said that none of the names struck me as that bad. Luckily, our mutual friend responded, "Look, chuzzlewit, this isn't an old curiosity shop. This is a national American corporation! These names are pretentious and obnoxious."


Yes, ladies and gentleman, it's true. These names might seem full of quaint English charm. But this is a tall tale of two cities. They slap all their nail polish with insufferably British names, but do you know where this company is based? Seattle. And last time I checked, Seattlites weren't always going on about snogging chimney sweeps over crumpets. Sorry, Butter London, you're not David Copperfield; you can't wave your wand and magically change your nationality and time period. Not only are you not on a nickname basis with "Charlie Dickens," I would be very surprised if anyone who works at your company ever got past "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

Anyway, at least the colors are pretty. If you've been saving your nicklebys lately, you could go for one. Just polish your monocle first.