Purple on Property Lines for Dummies

Purple "no trespassing" paint

Have you ever stopped to notice that the internet isn't just a local thing? Or that because you're an American, Brit, Pakistani, Kenyan, whatever; the words you use don't necessarily mean the same thing to the next guy? Probably not, especially if – like most of our staffers – you're a Yank. The syndrome isn't unique to Americans, though: we caught Canadian Dawn Sutton displaying it in "Ways to Mark Property Lines" for – who else? – eHow.com (we see that Leaf Group has now moved it to Hunker.com).

We'll be honest here: we aren't certain what the OQ had in mind, but we suspect it wasn't what Sutton described. For instance, Dawn tells her readers that

"Every land owner should have a registered survey with an official lot number for her property...[which] must be on file with the Land Registry Office in the locale of the land which is owned."

		Naturally, that wording made us curious: who has "Land Registry" offices, anyway? Why, Sutton's native Canada, of course; plus the UK, Ireland, Oz -- the British Commonwealth, in other words. The equivalent in the States varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, some with county recorders and some with state surveyor's offices; but there's no "land registry office" anywhere in the US, that we know of. Not only that, but in some states, homeowners aren't required to register a survey at all... Dawn's accidental chauvinism aside, the woman seems to have been confused about the nature of the question, not to mention the meaning of the word "underground":

"Some land owners may have driven metal pegs into the ground about 4 to 5 feet down at the corners of the lot. Rent or buy a metal detector to scan the ground to locate these underground [sic] stakes."

Surveyors, by the way, call those "rods"... And then there's her discussion of surveyor's stakes (which she calls "long metal posts that are visible about 1 to 2 feet above ground," but most people call "fence posts").

Most of all, however, Sutton seems to have completely missed the point: we figure the OQ literally wanted to mark the property lines, probably with "No Trespassing" signs. Although Sutton never said, you do that with signs nailed to trees or fence posts. In some states, a splash of purple paint or a strand of purple wire in the fence can serve as a "No Trespassing" or "No Hunting" sign. Dawn should have mentioned these things, but got hung up on survey stakes. We think that's reason enough for a Dumbass of the Day award.

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