Seen While Running...and Another "Posted" Rant

Pastoral pasture scene seen while running on Shinham Road near my home.

First off is the perennial stupidity of the sign on the tree.  If you don't want people to trespass on your land--and that certainly is your right--you should put up a sign that says "No Trespassing."

Whenever I see such signage proclaiming "Posted," I think, well, all that means is that the property has signs on it.  And the owner is an English language nitwit.

The language police in me has ranted about this before (here, here and here) at Mister Tristan (the blog, not the 7 year old human being).  I get how the colloquialism came about:

When a landowner wishes to keep his/her property off-limits to others, he/she posts signs along the boundary that indicate that the land is private property and others may not trespass without permission.  

In common vernacular, such land is described as being "Posted."  For example, a hiker might tell a friend, "I'd like to take you there to see that rock outcrop, but the land is posted" or a hunter would say, "You can't hunt there, it's posted."  That descriptor--saying that land is posted--simply means that the owner has put up some sort of sign indicating that people should stay out.

However, somehow along the way, a clear and simple sign saying something unambiguous like "NO TRESPASSING" or "PRIVATE PROPERTY" or "KEEP OUT" has been supplanted by the "POSTED" sign as in my photo above.  

In other words, the shorthand description of a property being posted with signs (i.e., off-limits) has morphed into the sign itself.

I also took the shot to get a tree in the far treeline in the image.  That tree in the front dead center in the blow-up frame below evidently is inside a cattle pasture, because the browse line is virtually laser-perfect: as high as a cow can reach.

I've also seen similar browse lines in forested areas where the whitetail deer population is out of control.

Image credits Gary