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)
