"Distanced to another world", aka passed away???

[snarkyjan]

As a kid in Tokyo I noticed that 回送電車(kaisou densya, it's trains that have finished service for a shift and are headed back to the train yard so are not picking up passengers) had the normal destination sign set to 回送 as you'd expect but they put an English translation under it on some trains, and that English word is... "DEAD HEAD."

I found this deliciously creepy. I would imagine all sorts of bloody horror things that could go on (I loved to read horror comics, yep).

Buses by me now in the US just say "NOT IN SERVICE" on the destination sign, not nearly as fun.

"Kill" is about a stream, it's the same origin as the "kill" in "Schuylkill River." So the "Fresh Kills Landfill" is named that because it's in Fresh Kills, which is an estuary. But certainly after 9/11 when they announced that the debris was being sent to "Fresh Kills" I did wonder if anyone would get upset over that name accident.

There was also a lot of squawking, about 20 years ago, about an upstate New York town called "Fishkill". The general consensus, locally, was that the kerfuffle was being caused by people with too much time, and too few brains, on their hands.