"We have jet pilots, firelighters, physicists and an austronat-that were once considered out of bounds for women." I was trying to look it up in dictionaries." I even tried this one
firelighter - definition of firelighter by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.. But none of them gives a definition in terms of an occupation. Another question would be, why is it "an austronat" in this sentence not "austronats? I would have used the plural.
***** NOT A TEACHER *****
Ostap,
(1)
Yes, there
WAS an occupation called "firelighter."
(2) I googled "Firelighter occupation." The 9th result on the first
page explains:
"...an occupation within the Railways or any other industry
that had boilers. [He] lit up and brought into steam a loco[motive]
or boiler."
(3) I then clicked on "more" in the menu on the left side of the results
page, and then clicked on "books." On the first page was an article from
Chambers's Journal (1907):
"Woe betide [Feel sorry for]
the firelighter if he has not a fair head
of steam and a good fire when the enginemen [driver of the train
and fireman] appear on the scene."
(4) You young people may not know that trains used to be pulled by
steam locomotives. I guess a firelighter's job was to start the
boiler. If he did a bad job, it could blow up and kill many people.
(5)
Nevertheless, I agree with the other posters. The use of
firelighter is obviously a typo (people who write books are only
human. They make mistakes like all of us!!!) First, probably the
job of
firelighter no longer exists; second, it does not make sense
to list this kind of "unimportant" job with "important" jobs such as
jet pilots, physicists, and astronauts. "Obviously," the writer meant
fire
fighter
.
(a) Here in the United States, teachers usually do not get angry
if a student respectfully reports that a book has made a mistake.
If you have a nice, understanding teacher, maybe you can tell
her about the mistake. (I wrote "her" because I hate using
"him/her.")
(6) Thanks for introducing me to a new word. As you know,
English has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world.
***** NOT A TEACHER *****
