So I just happened to go past a sign today that said 'Hand-Wash'. Guess what the sign was for?
It was a sign in a Shell petrol station for MANUAL CARWASH. Surprised? well, I was. We learnt today in class about collocation and priming concepts, and to me, hand-wash is a word with the pragmatic priming of handwashing something that can actually be held in your hand. For example, clothes, or... mainly clothes actually. To me, to describe hand-washing a car, one would have to make use of the word manual instead. Hence, if I were to see a sign like that out of this context, there is no way at all that I would connect it to a carwash. It just struck me as something interesting that I could note down, because it is in these everyday things that we don't usually notice, that the richest information can be foungd about our language and how it is used by the users. I'll post a picture of the sign if I happen to go past it again. =)