One day when I was a wee policy gnome, I was riding the ol’ 42 bus from Adam’s Morgan to my job at AEI. I was standing up reading the paper so that I was basically hovering above a youngish couple. He looked like a young Clintonite on the make. She was crunchier, like maybe she worked for some Dupont Circle environmental outfit. Anyway, they were chatting away about their schedules and whatnot when the guy asked the gal when she was going to pick up these two new cats she agreed to adopt. She said she was going to pick them up after lunch and drop them off at their apartment before she went back to work, or something to that effect.

He said, “great.”

Long pause. Then he asked, “What color are they again.”

She replied, “Oh, I think it’s called ‘Feral.’”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Oh, I think it’s a mix of colors.”

“Great,” he said.

Of course I can’t prove this but from the context it seemed pretty obvious that the young lady was adopting two feral cats and she thought feral referred to the color. I didn’t get a chance to rudely barge in on their conversation and explain their folly. But I always liked to imagine how they learned that feral isn’t a color, it’s what you call cats who destroy your apartment when you adopt them.