Floor

To floor a car is to put the gas pedal to the floor, to take off fast. I can feel floored when I am in disbelief, deer in the headlights, surprised. The floor of a room is the horizontal part we stand/walk on. It is the roof of the basement. A building can have many floors meaning levels which can be called stories, as in the building is X stories high. Where would we be without floors?

A deck is a wooden floor in the outdoors. Flooring as a verb is to install flooring the material that makes up the floor. Flooring someone is to surprise them at a level that stops them in their tracks. To floor is to knock down to the lowest level. A floor walker is the title given a person who is the sales and service representative in an old fashioned department store. We don’t get such service much these days.

Our 9 year old granddaughter plays floor hockey, a game played on a gymnasium floor using a stick and a soft donut-like puck. A floor is usually flat and horizontal, except when it is part of a skateboard park. There the floors are all curvy and rarely horizontal. Most furniture is intended to bring something well above the floor, like a table and chairs, for instance. Actually not able to come up with a piece of furniture that does not do that.

The dance floor can be a happy place, whereas the trading floor (stock exchange) holds both euphoria and sorrow. The first floor is often actually the second floor because the basement floor is at the bottom. When going up stairs, especially in an older home, there is often a little floor about half way up between floors and that floor is called a landing. A balcony is a floor protruding from a wall beneath a door.

The actual floor in a house, for example, is the structural parts that hold up the floor covering. Without the floor covering the floor would be close to useless as it would be really tricky to walk on or roll something across. If one is floored by an over the top surprise, could be wonderful or could be scary and awful. If you were to generate an event to floor someone, what would you consider doing?