Comfortable and Clean Journeys. Let's Clean Up, Just Bin It.

Caught another interesting thing on the bus!

"Comfortable and Clean Journeys. Let's Clean Up, Just Bin It."

Looks familiar? Saw these words on some sort of a poster on the bus. It's actually part of the "Litter-Free Bus Services" programme by the National Environment Agency (NEA). You can read more about it over here: http://app2.nea.gov.sg/hit_the_road.aspx

Nope, there's nothing terribly strange about these words. But I was just thinking about the word "it" used here. Just bin it. What does "it" refer to? I would suppose "it" here refers to litter. We can also do some inference from the surrounding words. If we want to have comfortable and clean journeys, we have to clean up and bin, what? "Litter", then, would come to mind. This illustrates an instance of collective lexical priming, or the notion of "frames". Here, readers who share similar cultural experiences would, upon seeing these words on a poster on the bus, invoke a clean-and-green context, and understand the poster to be part of a campaign by the NEA to promote a clean environment on the bus, by urging commuters to throw their litter into the dustbin instead of on the bus. And thus, readers would know that "it" here has to refer to litter.

I found the usage of "bin" interesting. "Bin" is used here as a verb instead of as a noun, which as we all know, refers to the dustbin in which we throw our litter. As for me, I'd usually use "bin" as a noun, to refer to the dustbin, but not so much as a verb. I looked up "bin" as a verb in Longman Web Dictionary, and this is what it says:

bin past tense and past participle binned, present participle binning [transitive]
British English informal to throw something away:
Just bin that letter.

So apparently, you can say something like:

I've binned the letter yesterday.

Or

I'm binning the letter now.

Hmmm.. Interesting discovery. =)

I did a Google search for "Just Bin It", and there was actually a photography competition for it! Check it out here: http://www.nea.gov.sg/just_bin_it/

Chelmsford Borough Council (in Britain) also has a "Just Bin It Campaign": http://www.chelmsford.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=11457

And East Ayrshire Council (United Kingdom) also has one too: http://www.east-ayrshire.gov.uk/comser/waste/binit.asp

Just Do It. Just Bin It. =)