Re: CHAT: halation (was: Re: Japanese English)

In a message dated 3/25/2000 4:51:38 PM Eastern Standard Time,
a.rosta@PMAIL.NET writes:

<< I know that. But English permits homonyms, and I can't see anything
erroneous
 about _halation_ 'breathing'. Anyway, I guess Roger meant it is erroneous
 because vanishingly rarely used, rather than, as I first thought, that
 there is something intrinsically malformed about it.>>

what I meant was:  we have the compound forms, but not AFAIK the base form--
"Halation" (IF it has something to do with breathing in the Sailor Moon
context) is a logical, but non-English, back formation.  Cf. agressive: to
agress; or inspiration/respiration: *spiration (all of these might be
attested in Renaissance times, when people like Shakespeare and Thomas Browne
created all sorts of new words from Latin, most of which did not survive) or
the more recent liaison: to liaise (yuck).  Probably a product of the
military mind.

 BTW, (a) is _florescent_ a typo for _fluorescent_, or (b) are they variant
 spellings, or (c) is there such as thing as a florescent screen? If (c),
 is the thing I always thought was a "fluorescent screen" actually a
 "florescent screen"? >>
    Don't have  a decent dictionary at the moment, but if "florescent"is a
word, it probably means "flowering" or some such; "inflorescence" does
exist-- technical term for the "flower" of certain plants e.g. the banana and
the coconut palm. Not to mention "efflorescence"-- what mildew does on my
walls.  "Fluor-" if I recall my long lost chemistry, has/originally had
something to do with the element fluorine.  Ultimately Latin? or Greek?