dr_whom

Toronto differentiates between three types of trash pickup:

recyclables
compostable food waste, the "green bin"
all other "garbage"

I find the use of garbage to label the non-compostable non-recyclables kind of jarring, for the following reason:

Historically, at least where I grew up, garbage specifically denoted compostable food waste, and trash all other refuse. I didn't think I had acquired this contrast myself—I've always used garbage and trash basically interchangeably as far as I know—but I think my parents might and I'm pretty sure my grandparents did make this distinction. But I must have it at least to some extent, since the use of garbage to refer specifically to non-compostable waste makes me do a bit of a confused double-take. When I see a barrel in Toronto labeled "garbage only", I have to stop and think about what it means, which certainly wouldn't be the case if it said "trash only".

So what's going on here is apparently that I don't distinguish between food waste and non-food waste in my active vocabulary; but in my passive vocabulary, if such a semantic distinction is to be lexically made, I do know which is garbage. Toronto trash-barrel labeling does make that semantic distinction, but with the word garbage assigned to the wrong category, so it throws me off. (What I have seems a little bit like a lexical equivalent of what's referred to as a "near-merger" when it happens on the phonological level: I think I don't make a distinction, but I actually do?)