On Jeopardy tonight, there was a question about a sealer with the same name as a tree. The contestant answered shellac. Alex said the answer was lacquer. Both were wrong, but shellac was closer to being correct.
There's no such thing as a "lac" tree, only a "lac" bug. For a list of the host trees, see:
And lacquer refers to nitrocellulose and acrylic mixtures having no relationship to the lac bug. It is true that in ancient times the red pigment derived from the lac bug was known as lacquer, but that was back when what we now know as shellac was a waste product :-).
Why am I posting this here? Because Jeopardy wants me to write them via snail mail and I'm too darned lazy. Maybe someone here knows someone on the show and can berate them about the error :-).