Falling Rocks. Why even mention such a possibility? Nothing's to be gained. If we're driving on the interstate beside a sheer rock face and we see such a sign, nothing is changed except that we're made extremely nervous. Aware or not, it would be unlikely that we could evade a boulder plummeting toward our car, and there's really no heightened level of defensive driving that could save us from a cascade of heavy rocks. We might make it but it would be dumb luck, nothing to do with an alarming sign. I say better to keep such information under wraps, and let whatever is fated to happen come as a surprise, or better yet evoke the possibility of hazard obliquely. Highway signs are too cut and dried, there should be more tantalizing suggestiveness, so that drivers are alert to the potential for catastrophe but are not plagued by overly specific images. For instance, instead of Falling Rocks, the sign could coyly say You Never Know. Then the passengers could look at each other and share a little nodding philosophical moment. Or the sign could read: Look Left, Use Imagination. That way even if nothing happens you've gotten those creative juices churning.

A sign I always found vaguely troubling as a kid was Soft Shoulder. The first problem was that I didn't know what "shoulder" meant in the road sense. So I thought maybe it was some kind of direction, shoulder as a verb, like you were supposed to gently nudge the person sitting next to you, perhaps to witness a breathtaking view at an upcoming Scenic Vista. Or maybe it was a reminder to always be emotionally available to your friends and loved ones. But even after I learned what a shoulder was, it still baffled. Soft compared to what? To me soft means, you know, soft. I imagined suffering a flat tire and pulling off the freeway only to descend into tapioca or bounce comically on a surface with a spongelike consistency. It's gravel or pavement or at worst dirt, how can that be considered soft? Even if it's, say, grass, that hardly counts as a surface whose softness bears remarking on an official sign, unless maybe you were planning on landing an alien spacecraft. You know what's soft? A down pillow. Fresh brownies. A baby's cheek. That's soft. No parts of a road are soft, not even the parts that aren't as hard as we would normally prefer. I could understand Softer Shoulder, or maybe Shoulder Lacks Normally Expected Hardness, or even Shoulder Density Deficient For Some Needs Such As Landing Alien Spacecraft For Example.