Driving home from a friend’s place last night, Karen pointed this out:
This is one of the windows on a “laundramat” in our neighborhood. I guess I’ve gotten used to “laundramat” for “laundromat”, but will I ever get used to “tripble” for “triple” (or even “tripple”)? Although I’ve spilled plenty of ink on the fact that e.g. p and b are nearly identical, I don’t think I will.
Googling for {“tripble”} returns about 550 hits; restricting the search to English-language websites results in 27 hits. The fourth hit of those 27 today is this page on a San Diego food blog, the author of which just happens to have found the same “laundramat” and “tripble” misspellings interesting — scroll down to the very bottom of the page. (I also recommend the comment on the picture just above that … something I often think about myself while driving around America’s Finest City.)
I’ve always been fascinated by regional variation in laundromat terms. I find it interesting that “laundramat” (which seems just completely wrong to me) is slightly more frequent (34.5K Google hits) than the archaic, but “correct” (to my ears) washeteria (27K). (My in-laws use this term all the time.) On the web, the next most popular is my personal favorite “laundrymat” (67.9K) followed by the boring standard “laundromat” (3.32 mil).
Since the sign is split across two panes, it looks like it might have once been a sign for a “dou|ble” washer. When they changed the sign, they may have just redrawn the left side. Why they would do such a thing, I have no idea.