Word of the Week

This week's featured quirky term which I encountered in the context of physics is "phoswich."
 
Why it's interesting:
It's fun to guess at what it means from the way it sounds. Is it a misspelling of "faux switch" (this control is just for decoration), or perhaps "foe switch" (she will flip this switch, and then I will have my revenge)? I can also picture an alien with a bottle-shaped snout hooting, "Pho, pho. Pho? Pho." A more mundane (and more plausible) guess would be that the "pho" part stands for "photo" or "phosphor."
 
What it is:
From googling the word, I see from the Saint-Gorbain website (a good source, since they make detectors) that it's short for "phosphor sandwich" and is a couple of scintillators hooked together to get better signals amid a large background. I will, at some point, ask Micha, not Google, for further information on what a "phoswich" is.
 
Where I encountered it:
Micha's post.