Good thing about being fond of people who are smarter than you: you get trivia feeds when you're with them. Proof that you can go gaga over him/her and not lose I.Q points.
Consider a typical conversation where you reach the word "gray".
Trivia injected: There are 14 shades of gray.
(At this time you have to thank God that you're not being asked how much you know about Khmer Rouge.)
Template Reaction: Oh really.?? If you come to think of it, a color can have infinite number of shades.
(With a trace amount of sarcasm, probably due to thinking, "How come I don't know that?")
Retort: No, I mean shades with a name. Like for red there's crimson, etc.
Feigning Intellectual Remark: Yeah, and there's vermilion for orange.
Attempt at Overthrow: Vermilion is a shade of red. Duh.
Impulse of Pride: No. It's a shade of orange. (To self: I know it, I know it.)
Challenge: It's a shade of red, even if you check it through internet right now.
Resolution: Vermilion, sometimes spelled vermillion, when found naturally occurring, is an opaque orangish red pigment, used since antiquity, originally derived from the powdered mineral cinnabar.
Whopee-doo. It's both a shade of orange and red. Safe. Win-win.
But I digress.
I looked for that 14 shades of gray. And what I found is a music anthology totally undiscovered by my ears: the music of Staind. This one here is So far Away from their album, 14 shades of gray.
Unfortunately I found 26 shades of gray, excluding black and white.
| Shades of gray | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gray | Arsenic | Ash gray | Battleship gray | Bistre | Black | Cadet gray | Charcoal | Cinereous | Cool gray |
| Davy's gray | Feldgrau | Glaucous | Isabelline | Liver | Payne's gray | Platinum | Seal brown | Silver | Slate gray |
| Taupe | Purple taupe | Medium taupe | Taupe gray | Pale taupe | Rose quartz | White | Xanadu | ||
| The samples shown above are only indicative. | |||||||||
But I enjoyed the 14 shades more.
