Don't Be So Testaceous

I could have sword that Wordsmith.org's words-of-the-day seemed a bit... off. Looking up their archives I found that the entries for last week were, in fact, purposely risque-seeming, despite the words' rather benign meanings.

For your edification:

• testaceous ("having a shell," or "having the reddish brown color of bricks or baked clay.")
• titivate ("to make smarter; to spruce up; to decorate.")
• vomitorium ("a passageway to the rows of seats in a theater.")
• cockshut ("evening" or "twilight" — apparently from the notion of night being a time birds are placed in barns.)
• turdiform ("like a thrush, or any of the songbirds of the family Turdidae.")
• albedo (either "the fraction of light reflected from a body" or "the white, spongy inner lining of a citrus fruit rind.")

And I'd be remiss not to include a link back to an early Back of the Cereal Box post on a similar subject: "Words That Sound Dirty But Aren't," which ran in the Nexus and which got us snooty letters for including "The Grand Tetons."