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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Just got an e-mail from my co-op board president (I’m now in charge of electrical stuff), and she wrote:
“Glad to know we do not have to install a new or additional light switch in the elevator room and that the elevator company install the necessary Florissant fixture/bulb?”
I’m assuming she means a “fluorescent” fixture—and she’s the only one who does this, apparently, bcs I couldn’t find anything anywhere else.
I’m guessing it’s a big like “Lehman’s terms” and the true phrase “Phillips screwdriver”—who knows who Florissant was/is, and really, who cares?
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I wonder whether this might be a spellchecker artifact. My spellchecker gives it as an option when I use “phonetic” spellings of fluorescent like “floressant.” Florissant is apparently a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri—which I guess explains why it’s in spellchecker programs.
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Florissant is also a small town in Colorado, west of Colorado Springs. It’s home of the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument (shameless tourism plug…! http://www.nps.gov/flfo/ )
Maybe (and this is admittedly a stretch), she just thinks they are lights made or invented in Florissant, or as Toots suggests, lights invented by someone named Florissant? I find it humorous and possibly telling that she capitalized the word. Fluorescent is not spelled the way one would tend to spell it, even having seen it spelled out (flourescent), so maybe she is just spelling it phonetically. (Wasn’t/isn’t there a movement in schools that encouraged kids to spell that way?)
Last edited by JonW719 (2008-02-01 16:05:48)
Feeling quite combobulated.
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She might have used a spellcheck; there were no typos in her note (missing words, though). I’d have expected her to get much closer to the true spelling of the word, though—she’s generally pretty literate.
I’d have expected her to spell it “flouresent” or “floresent” or “florrescent” or something.
And I think that’s why I have this suspicion that she’s just always thought of is as a Florissant bulb—though, come to think of it, I’m not sure she’s heard of Florissant, since she’s a NYCer, born and bred. (I have heard of Florissant, Mo., and I can’t for the life of me find “Florissant” as a person’s name—so I’m not sure where she’d get that spelling. Maybe it is a spell-check thing that I can’t duplicate)
Last edited by TootsNYC (2008-02-04 12:07:08)
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