On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 7:54 PM Dave Swarthout <daveswarth...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Nope, a mobile home is not the same as an RV or travel_trailer. Have a look > at the illustrations on the Wikipedia page. It is, as the Wikipedia > definition says, a prefabricated structure meant for permanent living. It has > wheels, hence the mobile part of its name but it's moved very infrequently, > sometimes only from the factory to its location inside of a, here's another > American term, trailer park.
In fact, it's not at all uncommon that one of these, on arrival in a trailer park, will be jacked, lowered onto piers, and have its wheels and axles removed. That way, it's not resting on its tyres and having them go out of round. If it needs to be moved again, a set of axles, brakes and wheels can be reattached. > An aside: As I consider this thread and the problems we're having with > terminology I came to the realization that most countries don't have such > things as we do in the U.S. Some of the motorhomes you see on American > highways are behemoths based on a full-size bus chassis, powered by big > rear-mounted diesel engines. I'd be willing to bet that no other country has > anything even approaching the sheer size of these things. And they are quite > common here. And are they expensive? Yep. 100 to 200K USD and up. And the self-propelled or fifth-wheel 'motorhome' that Dave just used in that paragraph isn't the 'mobile home' that would be (semi-)permanently installed in a trailer park. There are many people who live permanently in the units that are drivable, though. Often they take seasonal employment in construction or toourism and move the unit a couple of times a year to where the work is. They may rent a space in a trailer park, or at a campground, or simply set up in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart and occasionally visit a campground to take on water and pump out sewage. Other more wealthy individuals might own such a behemoth to spend holidays in, and count part of its expense against the expense of a hotel room and restaurant meals (and the drawbacks of restaurant meals versus home-cooked ones). > Anyway, how best to describe the plethora of such vehicles, in the U.S. > especially where they are so common, in one word? The term motorhome fits > such monsters and works for many other smaller vehicles like your garden > variety Winnebagos and extended van conversions but cannot describe unpowered > trailers or, in British vernacular, caravans. Just to be a little pedantic, 'motorhome' would also fit the big fifth-wheel units towed behind a monstrous great pickup - or at least the truck-trailer combination. Once you've outfitted a pickup chassis with the fifth wheel, the brake lines, the auxiliary transmission oil cooler, and the electrical system, you've pretty much created a special-purpose vehicle for towing the thing! And that's before you get into the ones that need a diesel semi. Most Americans would not recognize that 'van' is an abbreviation of 'caravan' nor recognize a 'caravan' as being anything but a camel train or a group of marching refugees. And most Britons would be puzzled that American 'van's are always self-propelled. > Where do we go from here? Recognize that Brittania and her colonies are sundered by a common language, and that the crazy Yanks need some words that are never heard in the UK - to describe vehicles that are never seen in the UK. The mandate to use UK English in tags breaks down when UK English lacks the vocabulary! _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
