I don’t know if this reflects a subtle problem with brain circuitry, but I sometimes find myself misreading signs encountered on the road or in other settings, with bizarre results.
This weekend I was walking through the hospital where I work and was taken aback by two adjacent signs, one reading “This Way to Eternity” and the other, “This Elevator Goes to Eternity”.
Holy moly, Jack Chick was right!!!
Of course, “Eternity” turned out to be “Maternity”.
Anyone else habitually do this, or should I make an appointment with the neurologist (vision is fine)?
I had a similar thing happen in the supermarket - I saw, in the dairy cabinet, a row of tetra cartons emblazoned ‘Breast Milk’. On double-take they turned out to contain Breakfast Milk (equivalent to gold top)
I dunno – I pass a college campus on my way to work each morning, and each morning I misread the lawn signs for “Cheer Camp” as being for “Queer Camp.”
I was passed by a van one day last month and had to do a double-take. It was emblazoned with a company name that I read as “Pointless Dent Repair” – which I thought was an arguably virtuous combination of corporate existential angst and truth in advertising. Turned out, of course, that it was “Paintless Dent Repair.”
The first Sunday on which I took Communion at my present church, I was surprised to see a small bowl of bread labeled “Guilt-Free Bread”.
I was almost disappointed to realize that this was not some quirk of theology I’d not encountered before, but rather a container of “Gluten-Free Bread”.
There was an antique store that I always thought was called Alien Antiques, till one day we were stopped at a stop light and happened to be right beside it. It turned out that it was Allen Antiques. Then there are the buses in Roanoke that have Kroger ads on the side that proclaim, “Let’s go Krogering!” which I kept thinking said, “Let’s go rogering!”
Not a sign, but did anyone else notice that the national television network changed the placard on their PSA’s about a year ago? They used to say “CBScares”
“CB Scares?” I asked my husband. “That seems an odd kind of honesty.”
Last night, as I pulled into my driveway, I noticed that the license plate of a car parked at the curb appeared to read “You are commanded to cut your neighbor’s throat and gnaw his beating heart out of his chest.” However, on second glance, it just said “GRK 755.” Not really sure how that happened.
Yesterday I told my wife how I was looking forward to Fred Phelps’s next protest, when a lady in a tutu would prance by and lob a grenade at him. She was totally bewildered, until I pointed at the newspaper headline: “Ballet explodes odd cult figure.”
Only it actually said “explores,” not “explodes,” so my lame joke got even lamer.
Of course, another headline had a picture of the entrance sign to Billy Graham’s ministry (which is made of etched marble and has a slightly rounded top, like a gravestone) above the phrase “Role of pastor’s wife changes.” That one was pretty grim even without a misread.
