If one spends enough time gardening Wikidata items, one eventually realizes that it’s German and English that both have an inordinate number of names for things. But whereas English has too many names for the same concept, German has too many named concepts. I say “too many” rather ironically – neither language has as many names for things as OSM English! But the path to a translation in English is not necessarily straightforward. Sometimes it requires looking at something from a different vantage point.
Recently, I attempted to translate emergency=suction_point into American English. This calque of German Saugstelle sounds ridiculous to a lay English speaker, like something right out of English as She Is Spoke, but a suction point is actually a thing: a pit beneath the foundation of a house for radon mitigation. Oops.
In fairness, emergency=suction_point does sound like the kind of thing that an English-speaking firefighter would seek out in their line of work. I had to search high and low before finally discovering that it’s called a drafting site, fire site, filling site, or fill site in industry jargon. Rather than naming it after the equipment (a suction hose), English-speaking firefighters apparently name it after what they need to do (draw water, fill the tank, don’t care how) or why they need to do it (fire!).
In this thread, you might’ve noticed me equivocating about which tag to use, if any. I guess a layperson might be satisfied by something like a “pathless” or “indefinite” route segment, but it’s hard for me to say for sure because I’m not entirely sure we’re all on the same page about what it is we’re trying to tag. One thing I am certain about is that we’ll eventually have to name a preset, and preset names definitely are nouns or noun phrases, not adjectives on their own.