Found this post making a joke on the use of JOIN in a Japanese restaurant. This instruction intends to tell customers not to rearrange tables, by placing them next to each other, thus making a "bigger table".
What is the correct word or phrase to be used here in place of JOIN, such as:
Please do not WORD or PHRASE here tables in this area.
I know that the message can be conveyed by rearrangement of words, but curious to know if there's a word or phrase that can retain the same word order.
Most people would not have a problem understanding this wording, though it is definitely not something a native speaker would say. It is amusing because JOIN is a command used to combine database tables. Only people familiar with databases would have any reason to laugh at this.
I think the best substitute would be pretty much what you already said:
Please do not rearrange the tables in this area.
This foils the joke, and sounds more natural to a native speaker. If you want to specifically address making "bigger" tables, you can say:
Please do not push together any tables in this area.
push together sounds a little more natural, and adding "any" makes it flow a little better.
Yes, as a database guy, I see this as an old joke. But to a normal human being, I think this would be a perfectly natural sentence.
There is a potential ambiguity: Do you mean, "Do not move or re-arrange tables", or do you mean, "Do not sit at a table where others are already seated"? I'd be tempted to think the second. If there is a group of people already sitting at a table, and you wish to also sit at that table -- whether because you know them or because there's no room anywhere else or whatever -- the common phrasing is, "May I join you?"
