I believe he's referring to cold-cathode fluorescent tubes, like the ones in LCD monitors.
These use a single hunk of metal in each end and an electronic ballast that applies a voltage high enough to strike an arc in the carrier gas, rather than a heater-filament in each end to serve both as an electrode for the arc and to initially evaporate some mercury and/or emit some electrons to bombard the mercury on the side of the tube to get the lamp started.
Each end alternates between being a cathode and an anode. Don't ask me why the focus on its cathodic function in the nomenclature.