I see this sign near my home and I know what it means, but when I think about the words, it seems to be gibberish. I realize that traffic-speak has to be terse but this one grates. Am I alone in this?
I agree with you. The meaning was not immediate or obvious to me. (In traffic, I think by the time I had figured it out, I would have run into something.) What would be a better alternative wording?
I'll agree that 'limited-sight distance' does not make sense but 'limited sightdistance' does (if I can make the compound noun–the spell checker does not like it). Ambiguous triples of nouns and adjectives are common.
One that stuck with me is "FALLOUT SURVIVAL SHELTER" from 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Brother Francis (600 years after a nuclear WWIII) thought of a Fallout as a half-salamander demon and hoped that there were not 15 of them surviving in it because its sign said, "Maximum Occupancy: 15″. We, who lived through the cold war, will have no trouble parsing it as a SHELTER for SURVIVing radioactive FALLOUT. Brother Francis went on to describe that Latin was much easier and illustrated that even in English word order sometimes did not matter, as in boy slave and slave boy meant much the same thing. But, house cat and cat house did not.
I guess it stuck with me since 1977 because it gave another perspective of a potentially ambiguous triple.
Emmett