From This Perch: signs

There's a lot that's quaint in the United Kingdom. The accents are quaint, the gardens are quaint, the thatched roof houses on country roads are quaint.

But the things that really catch my eye are the signs and notices. Their verbiage is a throw-back to a different era yet I'll be dipped if I know which exact time-frame. For example: whereas a traffic sign in the states would say "Yield" the British equivalent is delightfully polite "Give Way."

It's not just the phrasing, it's also the length. This street sign below makes no mistake telling the driver what's expected. Its message has more meat on it than I'm used to so when I first saw it I mentally rewrote it to eliminate 40% of the words (that's a real savings, folks!). But then I wondered what difference it really made. Why was it important to pare down the length?

The argument could be made that less is better because in fast traffic you don't want to be distracted reading a literary gazette. True, but the average speed limit here is 35 mph and in town centre traffic (where this was) it rarely gets even that high. So maybe it's okay to be a little wordy. In fact the wordiness, actually demands you take a second and get educated. As my Aunt Claire said, "Would it kill you to read something once in a while?"

And it's not just limited to traffic signs. Here's a page from our National Trust Guide that included a built-in bookmark. Again, my American mind automatically rewrote the directions to read: "Bookmark. Tear here." (I come from the land of square deals and straight shootin' where brevity isn't just the soul of wit, it IS wit.) Yet the country of Shakespeare, Brontë and Keats offered up something more elegant: "This page has been perforated so that it can be removed and used as a bookmark." I can't argue with it.