Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday’s posting on cow-tipping and related matters distinguished two verbs tip, played with in a cartoon by Daniel Beyer:

(1) give (someone) a sum of money as a way of rewarding them for their services

(3) overbalance or cause to overbalance so as to fall or turn over

and provided a joke sign prohibiting cow-tipping. There are of course also NO TIPPING signs, usually in restarants, prohibiting gratuities.

Now Benita Bendon Campbell reminds me of NO TIPPING signs in the UK that often baffle American visitors because they appear along roads, in places where gratuities would seem to be irrelevant. There are variants that show that a third verb tip is at issue here, one related to the

noun tip: British a place where trash is deposited; a dump. (NOAD2)

First, prohibitions on tipping in restaurants, as here:

(#1)

This from the French restaurant Zazie in San Francisco:

(#2)

(The restaurant’s name is an allusion to the 1959 French novel Zazie dans le Métro by Raymond Queneau.)

Now to some British roadside signs that say more than just NO TIPPING:

(#3)

(#4)

A British tip (as above) is a place where trash is tipped, thrown out of a vehicle. From a definitely British Wikipedia article:

Illegal dumping, also called fly dumping or fly tipping, is the dumping of waste illegally instead of using an authorised method such as kerbside collection or using an authorised rubbish dump. It is the illegal deposit of any waste onto land, including waste dumped or tipped on a site with no licence to accept waste.

… The term fly tipping is derived from the verb tip, meaning “to throw out of a vehicle”, and on the fly, meaning “on the wing” – to throw away carelessly or casually.

Morphological bonus. The term fly tipping / fly-tipping ‘tipping on the fly’ is a synthetic compound (in the PRP form) — most often encountered in its use as a nominal gerund (Fly tipping is prohibited), but also usable as a progressive (The boys were fly-tipping on Smith St.).

As I note here every so often, synthetic compounds very often serve as the basis for back-formation. As here, in the 2pbfv (two-part back-formed verb) fly-tip, in the Wikipedia article:

As the cost of disposing of household rubbish and waste increases, so does the number of individuals and businesses that fly-tip

This entry was posted on July 4, 2017 at 5:15 am and is filed under Ambiguity, Back formation, Books, Language and food, Signs and symbols, Synthetic compounds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.