The Thin Double Yellow Line [entries|reading|network|archive]
simont

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Tue 2006-06-27 09:36
The Thin Double Yellow Line

The first time I saw the road markings on red routes in London, I exclaimed ‘Ooh, red double yellow lines’. Then I laughed at myself for uttering such a self-contradictory phrase without thinking; but I later came round to the view that this is in fact a much better phrase than ‘double red lines’, because a listener previously unaware of the concept is likely to naturally infer from it that red double yellow lines are likely to appear at the edges of roads and have something to do with stopping or parking, whereas if you said ‘double red lines’ to someone who didn't know what you were on about then I'd only give fifty-fifty odds at best of you not having to explain that they were road markings rather than double red lines in some totally other context.

(The above paragraph is a perfect example of a curious tendency I've noticed in my writing recently: the entire paragraph consists of one short introductory sentence followed by one absolute monster sentence. I seem to do that a lot. Not sure why.)

Yesterday I checked with Google and was somewhat surprised to find that it disagreed with me:

Results 1 – 10 of about 636 for "double red lines". (0.37 seconds)
Results 1 – 2 of 2 for "red double yellow lines". (0.31 seconds)

I was reminded of this by yesterday's lunchtime trip to Tesco, during which I bought myself a pack of yellow pink wafer biscuits (gluten-free, naturally).

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[personal profile] lnrTue 2006-06-27 09:09
yellow pink wafer biscuits> *grin* excellent, I know exactly what you mean.
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[personal profile] gerald_duckTue 2006-06-27 09:32
Your second paragraph, however, is an exact counter-example: a long sentence followed by a short one and then one that's shorter still.

If gluten-freek pink wafers are yellow, one is forced towards the hypothesis that gluten is pink.
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[personal profile] simontTue 2006-06-27 10:09
Indeed, I don't claim that my writing is entirely composed of short-long paragraphs. I just think that if you collected data on the overall distribution of paragraph structures in my writing, there'd be a surprisingly high peak at that point.
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[identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.comTue 2006-06-27 12:19
Of course it makes sense. Compare "large shrimp" -- the phrase "yellow lines" means something specific, not just "lines which are yellow", so can sensibly be generalised from. It's best to avoid if there may be confusion, but it's (possibly surprisingly) the best description imho.
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[identity profile] pseudomonas.livejournal.comTue 2006-06-27 14:01
But with "shrimp", the slang meaning of "small" derives from the crustacean, rather than vice versa, no?
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[identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.comWed 2006-06-28 11:05
Doh. Sorry. I think you know what I mean.
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[identity profile] vyvyan.livejournal.comTue 2006-06-27 13:07
It may be that most people who talk about (double) red lines online have already become sufficiently familiar with the idea not to need to use this explanatory phrase. With some difficulty, I seemed to have tracked down the creation of Red Routes in London to about 1990 - presumably with their accompanying red lines. Indeed I seem to recall noting such lines when driving in London at the start of the 90s (my dad took me into central London to practise the day before my driving test!).
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