Today's deal is brought to you by the word "fuchsia".

It’s the color for people who want a really good deal on a great vacuum, no matter what color it is. Because today that’s all we have. But that’s not all fuchsia is.

First, note the spelling: “fuchsia”, not “fuschia”. Really. Look it up. Yeah, it’s weird. Based on the pronunciation “FYOO-shuh”, in English you’d expect s-c-h, in that order. But nope. It’s c-h-s. Because it’s named after a flower which is named after a dude named Leonhart Fuchs.

Another weird thing: fuchsia and magenta are, in most color systems, the same color. Fuchsia’s name was changed to magenta to commemorate the French victory over Italy in the Battle of Magenta in 1859? Leave it to the French to take it upon themselves to rename colors. Enough other nationalities refused to go along with the Francophile color-grab that we’re left with the dual-name situation we have today.

Fuchsia and magenta are both #FF00FF in web colors. They’re both 255,0,255 in RGB. Crayola says they’re different now, but while magenta had long been a full member of the “Classic 64”, fuchsia wasn’t added until 1990. The about-face is clearly the result of political pressure over Crayola’s pro-French bias in the Second Italian War of Independence.

Digital designers will realize something else unusual about fuchsia from those color codes: it is the product of red and blue cranked all the way up, with zero green. That makes fuchsia a full-fledged secondary color among additive colors (i.e., colors made from combining light, as on a TV or computer screen), along with yellow and cyan.

What does all this fuchsinating information have to do with vacuum cleaners? Nothing much, except that we’ve sold these many, many times before. Rather than mouth the same canned praise of the Dyson DC41’s effectiveness against pet hair and allergens, or grind out another explanation of the three different configurations which you can read about in the feature list to the left, we decided to take you on a stroll through the fuchsia garden of history and science.

It’ll all be worth it when you can zing your friends on the correct spelling of fusch- er, fuchsia. Now we just have to figure out what we’re going to talk about next time.