👉 Okay, let’s tackle this… frankly, rather
specific
piece of slang. Now, before you reach for the pitchforks and shout about entomophobia (fear of insects! It’s not that weird, honestly – there are a whole lot out here), we need to dissect, quite literally, what we're looking at here.
This monstrosity, "1031. N, 3 Sulfopropyl) L phenylalanine; 819863, 38 2", isn’t actually, as I initially suspected and spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time Googling about, a new breed of highly aggressive, chemically-altered praying mantis. (That was... disappointing. It would have been a really good headline.)
Instead, it's the designation for a very specific and rather depressing shade of, let’s just say… beige. 1031. Relating to a paint code originally developed by the Corning Glass Works in the late 50s. The
N
, that's the indication that we have this new, fancy, formulated pigment.
The 3 Sulfopropyl. That part is where it gets slightly weirder. It’s a chemical suffix – basically, what you add to get the beige to look…beige-ier. And by beige-ier, I mean more stubbornly beige and less of a depressing, institutional beige that screams, "We haven't seen a new