Walking to the office from the train today, I noticed a workman refreshing the paint on some traffic-barrier poles near my building. The poles were glistening in the strengthening morning sunlight, and there were signs taped to the pavement around them warning off the unwary who might brush against them. Something about this scene was so reminiscent of the television fantasies of urban life I’d been exposed to as a very small boy — think Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and about a billion cop shows set in the gritty decay of ’70s-vintage New York — that I couldn’t help but smile. But then I noticed something weird about those warning signs. One of them read “Almost Dry Paint,” which seemed like an unnecessarily specific descriptor. And then the sign next to the pole the man was still slathering with Battleship Gray read “Undry Paint.”

“Undry?” It’s bad enough that we now apparently feel it necessary to define different categories of wetness, but “Undry?” Really? Is that even a word? Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned clarity — not to mention concision — of “Wet?” Seriously, what could be more straightforward and absolutely not in need of elaboration than the traditional phrasing related to the transferability of newly applied paint? What the hell is wrong with the 21st century anyhow? It almost like society is adopting the foolishly complex language of the Coneheads and saying things like “electric incandescent illumination unit” instead of “lamp,” because, oh I don’t know, we’re living in the future or something, and everyone knows that people in the future speak in pointlessly convoluted ways. Because it’s the future, man. Arg.