a hard shoulder When we drove through England in a car there was the occasional sign of "no hard shoulder". We were wondering what it could possibly mean, but we always forgot to look it up. Finally I met some Brits with a car who I could ask and they explained to me that hard shoulder is what we call in German a Standstreifen - a lane for stopping. But also they couldn't explain why it would be called after body parts. Now I always envision some invisible head in the middle of the road to go with the shoulders. I assume other architectural structures, that have some kind of level parts in between slopes might also be called shoulder, but I was always too lazy to find out. And I probably wouldn't know that kind of vocabulary in German either.