Rubbish banter

An email went around the office a few weeks ago from the group secretary on the subject of rubbish receptacles, in advance of our forthcoming office relocation.

One of the sentences in the email was something like:

“On the West side of the lifts you will see a large wheelie-bin; this is in fact a skip.”

My immediate thought was that it must be either a wheelie-bin or a skip but could not be both! When I walked past it later that morning, I looked at it and concluded that it was a large black wheelie-bin and not – in fact – a skip.

I wondered what the cryptic sentence in the secretary’s email meant, and concluded that her definition of ‘skip’ was by reference to function rather than form (i.e. a skip is a temporary purpose-placed rubbish dumping unit that will be removed once it has served the specific purpose). By contrast, my own definition of skip is the physical one (i.e. large metal open-topped box with the distinctive shape for loading on and off the back of a lorry).

Although I haven’t thought about it in great detail as yet, I cannot really imagine many situations where different people can have such mismatches in their noun definitions – can any other Urban observers enlighten me? Or even come up with other nouns which are principally defined with reference to function?