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189 A.2d 130

Anderson v. Busada

District of Columbia Court of Appeals · decided 1963-03-21

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1963-03-21

How this case has been cited

Cited by 10 later decisions — most recently March 2018

2 district · 5 state decisions

40196319701980199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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HOOD, Chief Judge.

¶1 The trial court awarded appellee landlord possession of leased premises on the ground that appellant tenant had violated a covenant of the lease which prohibited use of the premises “for any other purpose than laundry service.”

¶2 It was conceded that the tenant, after conducting a laundry service business on the premises for some length of time, added to the business a “dry cleaning” service. The sole question is whether the permitted laundry service included dry cleaning service.

¶3 In answering this question we do not deem it necessary to resort either to the dictionaries or to the reported cases. Instead, following the tenant’s suggestion, we ascribe to the words in question their ordinary and popularly accepted meaning. In ordinary and popular usage there is a vast and distinct difference between laundry service and dry cleaning service, both in the methods used and the results accomplished. The tenant himself recognized this difference because when he added the dry cleaning service he changed the name of his business from “Normandy Laundry” to “Astro Laundry and Cleaners.”

¶4 Affirmed.

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