The Thin Double Yellow Line

[simont]

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).

Comments

[simont]

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.