Michael was an MA History student at SOAS when I was doing my BA there. We kept in touch after he returned to America. One day, he wrote to say he was doing a guide book on Connecticut, where he was living.
I asked him, “How are you going about it?” He said he’d drive around the state, look at a list of places, make some notes, take some photographs, then go home and do a write-up.
Going round places in America needs a car, unless you’re in a big city, so I immediately asked if I could be his passenger on these trips, offering to do his cooking and household chores in return. After all, he’d have three empty seats anyway.
On one of these journeys, we were driving along the edge of a forest when I saw, by the side of the road, a homemade sign — a piece of wood nailed to a pole rammed into the ground — with the words, “FILL WANTED”.
I didn’t know what it meant. Michael said, patiently as if to a child, “Well, someone has a hole in the ground that needs filling up, so he’s inviting people to bring their garbage along and fill up that hole for him.”
I said, “That’s a tip!” He said, “No, it’s not! A tip is what you give a waiter or waitress in a restaurant!”
He then went on to tell me that in his early days in London, he’d find signs by the side of the road saying, “Watch out for bollards”. He said, “I was imagining these bollards being little gremlins or something that might just step off the kerb, thus necessitating warning drivers to watch out for them, so as not to run over them.”
bollard
(British) a short post used to prevent traffic from entering an area.
He even pronounced it differently: “bollerd” instead of “bollard” (| ˈbɒlɑːd, ˈbɒləd |).
And they give it the same name: English!
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