"That's England for you"
« previous post | next post »
Here at Hulme Hall at the University of Manchester the dining hall is adjacent to the Hulme Hall Bar, connected by two sets of double doors about 15 feet apart. During the LAGB meeting, the dining hall is where the book exhibits and coffee breaks are located, and the only convenient way into it goes through the Hulme Hall Bar. Here's what that right-hand pair of doors looks like:
Note the large check mark just in case you aren't completely sure that pushing the bar to open the door is the right thing to do. And note that this is a way in, not an emergency exit.
The left-hand pair of doors is very similar, including the small blue circular sticker saying "Fire Door: Keep Shut", which is on both sets of doors. But what the left-hand doors lack is the device about two-thirds of the way up in the middle, with the small red sign reading "Alarm sounds when door is opened":
As a result, the left-hand doors are definitely the doors to use, because the little red sign on the right-hand doors means what it says — if you "push bar to open", an intensely loud alarm begins sounding.
Yesterday morning I was using the wireless internet in the Hulme Hall Bar, and so I had occasion to explain this to a few people who were tempted to use the right-hand doors. The response of one woman:
"That's England for you."
From her accent, she seemed to be British herself. I'm not sure what she meant, frankly, any more than I understand why the large green sign invites you to push the doors open, while the small red sign notes that an alarm will sound when you do. But that's England for you.
C Thornett said,
September 8, 2011 @ 3:30 am
This sort of thing is particularly annoying when you have just carried your suitcase down a few flights of stairs following the exit signs, only to discover an alarm notice when you finally reach the door. Then you have to carry and wheel the suitcase (heavy with literature and samples from a teachers' conference) until you reach a usable exit.
pj said,
September 8, 2011 @ 4:13 am
I wonder why an alarm sounds when the right-hand door is opened. Who needs to be alerted to the fact that that door has been opened, for what possible reason?
I (also British) am not sure what the woman meant either. I'm not aware that England is renowned for confusing door signage, for instance. I doubt she would have said that to someone she thought was a fellow-Brit; it was just an awkward attempt at self-deprecating humour prompted by the fact that this nice American man had been forced to encounter such a national embarrassment of an entry system on his visit, with a hint of, 'Even though you have found this disgrace in my country, dear sir, I assure you that there are some right-thinking citizens among us who do not endorse it.'
Nightstallion said,
September 8, 2011 @ 4:24 am
@C Thornett:
Frankly, in that case I'd go through that door. Not my problem if they can't correctly signpost their exits.
Derry said,
September 8, 2011 @ 4:52 am
The big green signs, pretty much all green with white lettering signs, are emergency signs. (Many of them glow in the dark too.) This is a way out when you're panicking, or grumbling because it's only a drill, that may well lead through areas that are normally out of bounds. The alarm is to alert staff that someone is leaving and wants to keep it quiet, or is about to get lost, or didn't wait to announce the emergency first.
Those doors are also fire doors designed to isolate fire on one side from possibly trapped people on the other. You can tell by the white on blue "Keep shut" signs. They are traditionally held open by a fire extinguisher.
I think the long-winded notice about the alarm is probably an attempt to get past the many, many jokes based on signs saying "This door is alarmed".
*attempts to remove H&S hat*
[(myl) That makes sense. But these doors, while perhaps leading eventually to a way out of the building if you pass through the dining hall to another hallway beyond it, are also the most obvious way into the dining hall.
And elsewhere in the building, there are others with the green signs but without the alarm (or the red sign warning about it). But I'm happy to learn that "PUSH BAR TO OPEN" actually means "EMERGENCY EXIT (AND SOMETIMES AN ORDINARY DOORWAY AS WELL)".]
Ginger Yellow said,
September 8, 2011 @ 5:26 am
From the looks of it, it doesn't matter which door you're open. The alarm device straddles both doors. Presumably the larger bit on the right has the alarm itself and a beam generator/magnet, while the bit on the left is how it tells if the door is opened.
[(myl) Apparently I should have been clearer. There are *four* doors, in two pairs of two, separated by about 15 feet of wall. All four doors lead from the bar into the dining room. All four doors have the big green "Push bar to open" signs. All have the little blue "Fire Door: Keep Shut" stickers. In fact, the two pairs of doors are identical in all respects, except that the right-hand pair have the "Alarm sounds when door is opened" sign (which is easy to miss — while I sitting in the bar using the wireless connection, I had to warn several people, deep in conversation, not to push the bar on one of the right-hand doors.)]
Michael Ellis said,
September 8, 2011 @ 5:45 am
I would understand the woman's comment to mean something slightly milder (and more accepting) than "This could only happen in England."
I think it was Stephen Fry who said something to the effect that Americans say "This could only happen in America!" when they encounter something wonderful or inspiring in their own country, whereas Brits say "This could only happen in Britain!" when they encounter something incredibly stupid, annoying, or weird.
Michael Briggs said,
September 8, 2011 @ 7:22 am
My favorite British sign: "Heavy Plant Crossing." Day of the Triffids?
möngke said,
September 8, 2011 @ 7:23 am
@Derry: yes, these are fire doors, like 95% of other doors in British public buildings that are not, in fact, classified as alarmed emergency exits – i.e., the "fire door" information is completely superfluous for the question at hand.
In my own experience with British university buildings, so-called "emergency exits" are often not alarmed even when there is a sign to that effect. Especially because the vast majority of the time it makes no sense for them to be alarmed at all, since they are usually located at "dead ends" of corridors, and keeping them closed unless in emergencies serves no other purpose than to herd people through a single entry/exit point. And the "out of bounds" argument doesn't make much sense either. Even out of bounds areas have to be accessed at some time or other, otherwise what's their purpose as "areas" at all? And having to turn off an alarm just to get there seems like an unnecessary step to take. They could, you know, just lock them if it leads to some dangerous equipment or something. (But also, why would an emergency route go through a space containing dangerous equipment in the first place… that's just bad building design.)
As for "that's England for you": that's actually what I would say as well, because stuff like this is quite typical for British (over-)obsession with order and regulations, not just on the health and safety front. Let us say that utter lack of flexibility with regard to Rules often leads to rigidity and pointless, less-than-transparent signage. Another example are road signs: I'm pretty sure it would be better not to distract drivers with pointless signs detailing how many yards of "hard shoulder" is imminently missing, since this is something they actually have to give their attention to in order to read, thus lowering the odds of them keeping their eyes on the actual road…
… but that's England for you. (Britain, better.)
peterm said,
September 8, 2011 @ 7:23 am
Of related interest is that most people, when pushing (or pulling) one of a set of double doors which then fails to open, will invariably then pull (respectively, push) against the other door of the pair. Surely, it would make more sense to next try the same action on the other door of the pair, or the other action on the same door of the pair, rather than trying the other action on the other door.
Victor Mair said,
September 8, 2011 @ 7:41 am
When I was enrolled at the School of Oriental and African Studies (part of the University of London) during 1968-69, I almost died because of a problem with the emergency exit doors in the residence hall where I was staying. It happened this way.
Around 2 a.m. one morning, I awoke to the smell of what I thought was badly burned toast. I stuck my head out of the door and immediately realized that the hall was full of thick, acrid smoke and that there were no lights (except one dim battery operated emergency light in the hallway). I also saw next door a young student sticking his head out of his room and looking absolutely terrified. Apparently we had slept through the fire alarms, for the entire rest of the building was deserted.
My first thought was: "get to the nearest emergency exit!!" Since we were on the 6th floor (7 by American reckoning), that meant we would have to go down seven flights of steps in the dark to get to the street. So, dragging the young student after me, I turned to the right and headed to the stairs. Since it was nearly pitch black in the stairwell, we were essentially groping our way down the steps one floor at a time.
After about three flights of steps, the young student could no longer continue because his legs were trembling so badly and he was in total panic. So I put him on my back and carried him down the rest of the way to the bottom.
The further down we went, the thicker the smoke became. We were both choking and coughing, but I struggled on until we reached the emergency exit at street level. Unbelievably, when I pressed with all of my might on the escape bars of the door, I was stunned to discover that they were chained and locked shut!
This is one of the 6 times in my life when I said to myself, "You are about to meet your maker, Victor." It was almost impossible to breathe. Every time I took a breath it was as though a knife were cutting my lungs. By this time, the young student was inert, so I was carrying him on my back like a lifeless clump of heavy clay.
With no time to waste, my instinct was to climb back up to where we had started. I have no idea how I got back up those 7 flights of steps, but I finally made it back to my room. Sticking my head out of the window, I saw crowds on the street below and fire engines all around. Waving to the firemen, I got their attention and they moved one of their truck-mounted ladders outside my window. I climbed down myself in my underpants, and a fireman brought down the young student.
The next day, when I went back down the stairwell to see what had happened to us during the night, I discovered that the door was properly labeled as a fire exit, but unusable because it was locked shut. I also was astonished to learn that the very source of the fire was a huge pile of sheets in the basement very close to the fire exit I was trying to get out of. The fire was that smoldering, foul smoke producing kind of slow combustion that kills by asphyxiation. So the closer we got to the fire exit, the more intense was the smoke.
I coughed up black soot for days after that narrow escape, and my lungs were sore for weeks.
One thing I forgot to mention: after I had climbed back up those 7 flights of steps to my room, I was much comforted by running into the warden of the house himself who was systematically going through the hallways with a flashlight to make sure everyone had gotten out. He had a handkerchief over his mouth and nose and was himself choking as he went along. I think, in fact, that he may have been hunting for the young student and me since we were apparently the only ones in the whole dorm who had not been accounted for you.
The warden helped me out the window and onto the ladder that was so high up above the street. I do not remember clearly, but he may also have slung over me a coat that he found in my room. After I went down the ladder, he helped the young student into the hands of the fireman outside the window who was waiting to receive him.
That's England for you.
Jacob said,
September 8, 2011 @ 8:59 am
A type of operant conditioning? Lab rats get a shock when they press the button for food/drugs/x reward. Brits and visiting scholars get the shame of the alarm when they try to enter a pub?.
[(myl) No, in this case they would be exiting the pub-like area and going into the dining hall.]
Jacob said,
September 8, 2011 @ 9:02 am
oh, how embarrassing. It seems I should've read more carefully; bar is actually a bar and not a place to consume alcoholic beverages.
[(myl) The Hulme Bar is indeed a place where alcoholic beverages are sometimes available for consumption:
It has, alas, been closed thoughout the LAGB meeting. But this does raise the possibility that the undergraduates normally in residence are undergoing operant conditioning to train them to stay in the pub.]
Anthony said,
September 8, 2011 @ 9:20 am
"That's England for you" seems to be used for particularly English sorts of stupidity. In this particular case, it's a case of "too clever by half", a peculiarly English expression (which Americans understand, but don't use as often).
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to determine that in the likely conditions of a fire – at night, power out, illumination only from the fire – that white on green is significantly more visible than white on red, and thus mandated that certain fire-safety signs be white on green. Thus ignoring how people will respond to a white-on-green sign in the 99.9999% of the time that any given public building is not actually on fire. (The Brits may have an excuse – if their database goes back 70 years or so, it's only 99.9% of the time that public buildings aren't on fire.)
We Americans have had something similar with the experiment of making fire trucks greenish-yellow – they're supposedly more visible than red. However, people don't respond to that particular shade of greenish-yellow as emergency-related, and are less likely to give way than if the fire engine were painted red. Since Americans believe that the U.S. is the whole world, saying "That's America for you" wouldn't make sense, so instead we single out some subset of America to use in that phrase – "that's government for you" or some such.
Rose Eneri said,
September 8, 2011 @ 9:38 am
I'm concerned with the check marks on the green signs. My instinct would be to push on the bar just below the check mark. This would work well if I were pushing on the right-side door's bar because the door hinges are on the right, so the door is opened most easily by pushing on the far left of the bar.
However, this does not work well on the left-side door where if I push on the bar just below the check mark, I am pushing near the hinges and the door will be very hard to open.
The green signs should come in a left-side check and a right-side check version, one for each door. Perhaps they do, and were simply installed incorrectly. I'd walk around and try to find a set of doors with both check marks on the right side of the green signs.
NW said,
September 8, 2011 @ 10:13 am
The whole set-up screams KEEP OUT to me (even ignoring the little red thing). A door for going through has just a wooden horizontal panel (and no overlaid metalwork), and you push that. The green sign is covering the place where you would expect to push if there was no sign.
[(myl) Except that the left-had pair of doors, which is the only way to get from the bar into the dining room, looks EXACTLY THE SAME except for that "little red thing". And the normal way to enter the dining hall seems to be through the bar.]
I'm not much good with machines and at this point I'd see if I could find a door that you just push open, and that wasn't labelled with, in effect, 'Here's what you need to do because the obvious thing won't work.'
And the tick iconically ought to mean 'This is the right thing to do', whereas in fact it isn't, and you should only do what the sign says when you can't not do it – i.e. in an emergency, and in an emergency a DO NOT ENTER sign would work just as well for ignoring, and would work better for the rest of the time.
alyxandr said,
September 8, 2011 @ 10:46 am
What *I'd* like to know is why the English so often put pull-handles on doors meant to be pushed, instead of pushplates. I can't count the number of times I've pulled a handle before noticing the "push" sign.
(And playing *two* holding midfielders? Really?)
rgh said,
September 8, 2011 @ 10:51 am
A Dutch friend once said that supermarkets in the Netherlands would have a sign saying "Exit"(or its equivalent) where those in the UK read "No Entry", and found this indicative of something.
My favourite road sign is the hope-giving "Changed Priorities Ahead".
Dan Hemmens said,
September 8, 2011 @ 11:59 am
I think the other thing to remember about those particular doors is that it's very like the doors and the alarm were added separately, meaning that the basic door would have a set of instructions telling you how to open it ("Push Bar To Open" – a common sign on that type of emergency door, which is often used as a fairly standard exit-only door in large buildings) while the alarm comes with a sign telling you that the alarm exists.
Ian Preston said,
September 8, 2011 @ 12:05 pm
I don't think that the tick is there to signify correctness or where to press. It is there because the sign is part of a fire escape route, because safety regulations require that such signage "must be pictographic" (and "can be supplemented by text if this is considered necessary to make the sign easily understood") and because a tick is suggested by British Standard 5499-4:2000 Safety signs, including fire safety signs: Code of practice for escape route signing as the most appropriate symbol "to draw attention to a safe condition indicated by supplementary text when no specific pictogram is suitable." I believe these signs always come in versions with the tick on the left. (You can also get similar signs with a picture of a hand gripping a bar.)
The blue signs are mandatory according to The Health and Safety (Safety Signs and Signals) Regulations 1996 and are required to be positioned round about eye level on both faces of each leaf of any self-closing fire doors.
Ben C said,
September 8, 2011 @ 12:38 pm
It does seem to me that British people have a memetic image that the UK has more unnecessary and confusing bureaucracy than other places. (Hence the line from the Hitchhiker's Guide movie–the newer one– "Trust me, I'm British; I know how to queue."
James said,
September 8, 2011 @ 1:07 pm
This reminds me of one of the only things I remember from my brief high school internship with an architecture firm in Georgia. The firm was designing a church, and there was a classroom with a door that opened to a little outdoor courtyard area, which was adjacent to, and in no way physically separated from, the entire rest of the outside world.
They were going to meet all the fire exit requirements with or without this door, and presumably the room wasn't expected to be a high-traffic area, so the church decided to save some money and not equip the door with the alarms, signage, and whatever else is involved with officially designating a door as a "fire exit". The result of this was that a Magritte-esque "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT" sign was required to be posted above it.
Rubrick said,
September 8, 2011 @ 1:17 pm
I think Victor wins the Most Gripping Comment contest.
Matt said,
September 8, 2011 @ 1:23 pm
My favorite road sign of all is in New Mexico – it says "Gusty winds may exist" – maybe intended as a brief crash course in philosophy?
[(myl) Indeed:
A good example for a unit in pragmatics — I may adopt it for that purpose.]
Peter said,
September 8, 2011 @ 1:28 pm
I don’t know if the following is accurate or an over-generalisation from my own experience, but a Brit coming to the states, I found the implicit colour-coding convention of exits different from what I was used to. In the UK — I think — red almost always means “alarmed”, green just means “exit (alarmed or not)”; while in (parts of?) the US, red means “exit (alarmed or not)”, while green usually means “not alarmed”. The one bit I’m quite confident of is that red in the UK denotes an alarm: it took me months to get over a strong aversion to using doors marked with red signs.
So, egress-based operant conditioning clearly works! Those students will learn to stay in the bar…
Bruce said,
September 8, 2011 @ 3:25 pm
Does the door open immediately when the bar is pushed? It might be one of those bars that requires a sustained two-second press before it opens, and that could be what the green sign is trying to convey.
[(myl) It's an ordinary push-the-bar-open-the-latch kind of bar. Good old-fashioned physical levers, no fancy electronics involved.]
Victor: amazing story!
Eric P Smith said,
September 8, 2011 @ 4:17 pm
@Victor Mair: indeed yours is a gripping and amazing story, as Rubrick and Bruce have said. So serious and frightening that I have no moral right to add this trivial comment, but my Asperger’s mind compels me to. Since you were on the 6th floor (7 by American reckoning), that meant you had to go down six flights of steps, not seven, whichever country you were in.
Sorry.
Ian Preston said,
September 8, 2011 @ 6:34 pm
The bar is a panic bar, a locking device which is nonetheless easily opened by someone with no prior familiarity and recommended by fire regulations for securing doors on fire escape routes in educational premises frequented by members of the public (see p 124). Those same regulations require that such a sign with exactly that wording be permanently displayed above the push bar on any such door (see p 104). What the green sign is trying to convey is therefore (a) a clear and simple instruction about operation to anyone attempting to leave the building in a hurry (b) a message to the fire safety inspector that regulations have been read and complied with.
Jonathan D said,
September 8, 2011 @ 7:34 pm
I saw the picture before the post title, and my first thought was "That's England, isn't it."
And yes, 4.5 years there did train me to think of any white on green door signs as not necessarily being helpful to everyday situations.
Mark Mandel said,
September 9, 2011 @ 12:00 am
Seen just today: The Medical Intensive Care Unit at the Hospital of the University of Philadelphia has, in at least one place, a red illuminated EXIT sign over a door prominently labeled NOT AN EXIT.
This is comprehensible if one recognizes that the EXIT sign is the standard indication of a fire exit. If the place is on fire, you can get out that way, but otherwise nobody but staff should use it.
Paul said,
September 9, 2011 @ 3:06 am
Regarding Victor's locked and chained fire exit doors, we Brits were supposed to have sorted that sort of highly dangerous nonsense out years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Hall_disaster (very glad it turned out ok for Victor in the end).
And, yes, as a Brit I am trained to react to doors with big green signs saying "push bar to open" by trying to find an alternative exit. I suspect it's the bars as much as the signs, though – most normal exit doors don't have that kind of push bar.
[(myl) That's different in the U.S. — I can't think of a single exterior door at the University of Pennsylvania that *doesn't* have one of those "crash bar" latches. (I can't check because I'm still in England; but let's say at least that the default pattern for (the inside of) exterior doors is latches of that kind. If you insisted on trying to find a "normal exit door" without that type of latch, you'd never get out of one of our buildings.]
Dan Hemmens said,
September 9, 2011 @ 6:00 am
Like Paul, I instinctively avoid "push bar to open" doors because they so often have alarms attached.
That said, it *is* fairly common for that kind of door to be used as the exit of a nightclub, cinema, or theatre. On the other hand those doors are usually already open when I might want to use them (particularly in theatres and cinemas, where they get opened when the production ends).
I *think* although I couldn't check that when those kinds of doors are used for ordinary exits in the UK, they're also frequently accompanied by a prominent "EXIT" sign, but I could be talking utter nonsense here.
Victor Mair said,
September 9, 2011 @ 8:57 am
@Eric P Smith
Indeed! Thank you for the correction, and thank you for introducing me to Asperger's Syndrome, which I hadn't know about before.
Ken Brown said,
September 9, 2011 @ 10:04 am
I'd assume the bar mechanism is so that in a real panic the door will open when anyone falls or is pushed against it. There are similar external doors at football stadiums for example.
Boris said,
September 9, 2011 @ 10:27 am
My intuition (in the US) is that green means go and red means stop. This translates nicely to the doors. Of course, in a non-emergency situation, I would stop and read what's written on the door before using it. But honestly with (to me) conflicting signals on the door pictured, I would follow the larger sign and use the door.
Usually "not an exit" is reserved for doors which physically don't lead to an exit. Why would someone not just put "Fire Exit Only" (the only makes it clearer. My inclination is to not use doors without the only either unless no other doors are available).
Finally, I don't think that sense of "alarmed" is in my idiolect, though it's handy to have a single word for this concept.
Mike said,
September 9, 2011 @ 10:33 am
It's not uncommon to run into signage that is seemingly pointless or confusing. In this particular example I think they need to clearly mark 'Emergency Exit Only'. Perhaps making them magnetic might be the way to go if the hotel doesn't want them opened, but that's besides a bit off topic.
Every country has a saying similar to 'That's England for You'. I usually hear it as 'Only in Argentina/Ireland/Canada…..' We all see funny things. There are sites with funny sign picks out there. Read some good ones recently at happyplace.com.
Mark F. said,
September 9, 2011 @ 11:42 am
What I don't understand about that situation is why the designers only wanted one pair of doors to be used in the regular course of events. Does the bar have merchandise (say, candy or something) that can be picked up and paid for at the bar? If so then I can see why they might want to have fewer exits to keep an eye on.
Ben said,
September 9, 2011 @ 2:47 pm
@ Victor
Wow.
Don't leave us in suspense, what were the other 5 times like?
Dan Everett said,
September 9, 2011 @ 3:34 pm
You didn't comment on the really weird thing, which is that the pronunciation of "Hulme Hall" is not "hulm hall" but "hiuum hall."
Now that IS England for you and the people who know who to pronounce look condescendingly at the dumb yanks who don't.
But it is a wonderful place to have a pint and the alarmed doors just make it more fun for the pissed undergrads.
Gene Callahan said,
September 9, 2011 @ 4:41 pm
What about signs that read, "This door must be kept closed at all times"? Wouldn't a wall have worked better in that case?
Mary Kuhner said,
September 9, 2011 @ 4:49 pm
A small detail that brought home to me a cultural differences between the US and the Czech Republic: my hotel room in Cesky Krumlov locked with a key, and could not be opened from the inside without that key. Also, to our surprise, the conference room in the House of Prelate where we held our workshop worked the same way, as we found when the groundskeeper locked us in. "You said you would be done at 10:00 PM, so I was going to come back and let you out."
Such setups are illegal in the US after, as I understand it, several bad fires: public buildings and hotels must always allow you to leave. (Though I have suffered the "down ten flights of stairs to a door with an alarm" problem many times in US hotels.)
I used to work in a large medical center with the problem that fire services could not get *in*: it had grown too much and large parts of it were internalized and out of reach. I have several times seen the fire trucks sitting sullenly outside, unable to get anywhere near the putative fire: luckily, each time they were able to put the fire out using hand-carried extinguishers.
Chris Brew said,
September 9, 2011 @ 7:21 pm
"That's England for you." is pretty the same thought that you get when we say "typical!". Every time we go to renew our moaning licenses, expats like me have to take a government-sponsored refresher course in stoical acceptance of small and wildly unnecessary inconveniences and annoyances. If we'd invented Latin, there would be a special interrogative particle for "Question expecting the answer 'Oh. for gawds sake!".
peter said,
September 10, 2011 @ 3:35 am
I once saw a great sign above the entrance door to a cafe in Palo Alto, which read (IIRC): "Door must not be closed when open."
Since this was the only exit to the street, I think what was meant was: "Door must not be locked when cafe is open for business".
Mike Maxwell said,
September 10, 2011 @ 2:38 pm
This way to the egress?
Anyway, a fun read, which touches on these kinds of things:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=5393
Janice Byer said,
September 11, 2011 @ 2:22 am
My experience of England is "merely" two wonderful family trips to see the sights in London, where we did mark what to us seemed consistently different in how advisory signs are worded. To check our perception, I Googled "English signs" and got stuff on sign language, heh, but "British signs" retrieved a wealth of photos and a surprising lot of validating American commentary, albeit wide-ranging in the subjective feelings expressed toward the difference. What I viewed as kindly explicit and painstaking, others saw, for examples "wonderfully formal",
Janice Byer said,
September 11, 2011 @ 3:05 am
Oops, premature ejaculation. Again, some views I read are "condescending" "too much" "officious" "conversational" "wonderfully formal" and "anal". I'll return to link images of some signs after I sync this to the computer i trust
James Wimberley said,
September 11, 2011 @ 5:16 am
The green tick mark is a bad mistake. as it suggests that the sign applies in normal circumstances. A better icon for emergencies would be an exclamation mark on a yellow or orange background.
European road signs are IMHO far superior to their American equivalents, because the iconic conventions are reasonably uniform and transparent. The generic "trouble ahead" sign for instance is a black exclamation mark inside a red-bordered triangle, and everybody learns red triangles are hazard warnings in driving lessons.
Kat said,
September 11, 2011 @ 6:45 am
But of course by the end of the conference you would have no doubt realised that you could open that door – it wasn't alarmed at all.
Janice Byer said,
September 11, 2011 @ 12:34 pm
I agree with James Wimberley that government-issued signs in Europe suggest considerable effort has gone into ensuring the clarity of the message. I don't recall marking a difference between Canadian signs and American, inclining me to think in admiration, "That's Europe for you".
As promised, below are some quotations and a collective link reflecting actual British signage found via a Google search of "British signs". (The humorist Dave Barry blogged about some of them.) In consideration of LL's international readership, I attempt also an American translation. I trust tourists from abroad don't find our signs terse to the point of rudeness.
"British Transport Commission warning is hereby given to persons not to trespass upon the railway. Penalty not exceeding 40/-".
American translation: "Keep off the tracks".
——-
"As requested by our customers, would all persons please wear a shirt or a t-shirt whilst in the restaurant."
American translation: "Shirts and shoes required"
——-
"Licensed in pursuance of an act of Parliament for music and dancing or any other entertainment of the like or similar nature."
American translations: "Dance Hall"
——-
"London Borough of Camden warning: It is an offense to allow dogs to foul the walkway."
American translation: "Scoop your poop"
——-
http://www.google.com/search?q=british+signs&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=QLS&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=odRsTvmPAa_D0AGitqSeBQ&ved=0CCQQsAQ&biw=1280&bih=612
David said,
September 11, 2011 @ 7:52 pm
@Ben C: I don't know if "Trust me, I'm British; I know how to queue." has anything to do with British bureaucracy. My mother, during her time in Europe, was impressed by the way the British queue, neatly and naturally, in comparison to the Americans and especially the Germans who she described as mobbing. She's proud of the day she did as the Germans did in Germany and squeezed her way to the front of the group to get John Denver tickets; on the flip side, she recalls the day they were in London and saw a couple British ladies keep a German tourist in line, silently and apparently unconsciously.
Katherine said,
September 12, 2011 @ 7:04 am
Only in England: painted on one lane of a roadway: "Ahead only".
Well, quite. Anything else is behind you or to one side. Painting annotations all over the road would be silly and distracting.
However, it is intended to convey "no [left or right] turn from this lane", which is obvious, if you are to the manner born. If not, you may find yourself unable to get there from here.
Tom said,
September 12, 2011 @ 4:58 pm
This is slightly off the linguistics side of this, but I would have thought that having an exit from a bar which sets off an alarm when you open it would be a very good way of conditioning people to ignore fire alarms.
Alon Lischinsky said,
September 13, 2011 @ 4:18 am
@Mark Mandel: a recent visit to the UK made me wander about emergency exit signage.
I've always found 'Emergency Exit Only' signs confusing. Except when posted directly next to the exit in question, they suggest that a given area is to be used only in case of emergency, when it might be the case that other facilities are located there, just not exits. Gatwick provided me with an example of much better wording: 'Exit Only in Emergencies'.
David Walker said,
September 13, 2011 @ 11:50 am
I agree about the sign "This door must remain closed at all times". At ALL times? Then, someone should plaster over the door and turn it into a wall, if it never should be opened.
Ari said,
September 15, 2011 @ 10:18 am
Dear Victor
Inquiring minds want to know about the other 5 events. Spill the beans, I beg thee!
Just another Peter said,
September 27, 2011 @ 2:01 am
By law in Australia, exit signs must be white writing on a green background, with the sole exception being the senate floor in Parliament House. They're allowed to have white writing on a red background there so as not to clash with the rest of the decor (primarily pink).