I don't pay much attention to online ads, but the one next to the sudoku on The Washington Post website today caught my attention:

The Fenestra Apartments. In Rockville, Maryland. Really. Here's their website. They're upscale apartments.

My first thought was "Do these apartments have more windows than usual?" (Perhaps. They do advertise "oversized, double-paned, insulated windows.")

Then I began to wonder if defenestration might be a problem at the Fenestra Apartments.

Finally, I decided to look up the word. I didn't really expect to find it. I was actually looking up fenestrate, because while you hear people discuss defenestration from time to time, fenestration is not as common.

But, indeed, the Shorter Oxford had fenestrate ("having small window-like openings"), fenestrated ("furnished with windows"), fenestration ("the arrangement of windows in a building", and fenestra itself, which means in anatomy "a small hole or opening in a bone, etc.," and in botony "a small mark or scar, indicating the point at which the seed has separated from the ovary."

Fenestra Apartments means Small Hole Apartments.

Personally, I don't want to live in a small hole. Not even an upscale small hole. 

I'll bet anything somebody got paid good money to come up with that name, somebody working in "branding" and marketing, somebody supposedly good with words. Haven't people in that line of work ever heard of dictionaries? Or -- for that matter -- checked out a word on Wikipedia?

You can find fenestra there, too.