>I fed you this message, knowing you'd dine out on it! :-)

I felt I had to oblige :).

>>>construction - road works;
>>
>>Ah but then someone may get confused and think "finally one that works" and just step on it. But they also can't say "road being built" because it's too long, or "road building" because it's too ambiguous (would that be a "roadhouse", or "what is this road building now" or - this is one of those where you have ambiguity with not enough context to disambiguate); and it also can't be "road under building" because everyone would say "under which building? I don't see any" - so it's the shortest unambiguous phrase possible: "road under construction".
>
>Quite finished ? .....

Not sure... there's still some trace of ambiguity. I'm not quite sure they didn't mean a geometric construction until I see all those Vogon-colored machines labeled "Cat".

>>Did you know that almost half of the American highways are built the wrong way? You can see the "wrong way" signs everywhere - and they are true, because you see that anyone who tried to go that way is coming back the same way.
>
>Ha Ha. We don't have that sign - just the "no entry" disc at the "wrong way" end.

That's there... most of the time, but usually painted/printed on a white square with some extra text.

>Sorry - meant "median" - comes from living within spitting distance of the Greenwich Meridian here :-)

And surely there's a sign "No parking on the meridian" :)

>>>Windshield - windscreen, stick-shift - gear stick; stick-shift (operation mode) - manual; trunk - boot;
>>
>>Good that you named yours after a footware item instead of a part of a tree :).
>
>Actually, I think you'll find that the rear luggage compartment on the old horse buggies is still called the boot. To us a trunk is the large box you drag onto passenger liners.

So there's a passenger liner and the other kind of liner that goes into non-travel suits and coats. Ahem. And the practice of reusing existing words to mean new things seems to be alive for centuries. Just from this line of messages I've picked half a dozen missing words in English - you know, things that don't have a word which would have them as its primary meaning.

Just found that "line" has 29 basic meanings as a noun, plus seven as a verb. I bet at least 20 of these have no other word to be expressed with.