Trash terminology: a lexical near-merger?

[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?)

Comments

[dr_whom]

Cf. also garbage disposal, the appliance, which uses the traditional (I think) meaning of garbage.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

Huh. You know, I'd never thought of it before, but I think my intuitions here are exactly the same as yours.

[q10.livejournal.com]

as far as i know, i don't have this distinction at all, but i've definitely encountered other people claiming to have it.

before learning others had the distinction, i just assumed ‘garbage disposal’ and ‘trash disposal’ would be synonymous, and you knew to only put food waste in it because (1) it was not up to the task of dealing with harder, less organic substances and (2) it was typically located in the middle of a food prep area, so other non-food types of organic waste would be gross to bring over there.

[boojum42.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting point. At girl scout camp they made that distinction between "garbage" and "trash", though I don't think I internalized it enough to interpret "garbage only" as referring to food waste.

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

Interesting that in Canada, the Britishism "rubbish" isn't relevant here, although as you say, the words above are being used as jargon terms in a sense.