It seems a day (well, a day which isn’t spent entirely indoors) never goes by when I don’t see a poster, sign, or billboard that has a glaring spelling or grammatical mistake that really should have been caught at the editing stage.
These range from the common-or-garden “Tomato’s” and “Lettuce’s” on fruit & veg stands or “your” used in place of “you’re” to ‘wish-I-had-my-camera’ examples such as the pub sign in Oxford advertising “Ice Cold Bees”.
So, any favourite (or most annoyed-by) examples of bad sign wordage?
Yes, I know ‘wordage’ isn’t a word
Why, oh why, are the people who cannot read or spell always put in charge of making signs? I see something every freakin’ day. I have noticed, walking through the grocery store, a giant display of some item, in which there are dozens and dozens of boxes or packages. Somebody has made a hand-written sign for the display, in view a hundred examples, and spelled the name of the product wrong. One of them was for Wonder Bred. Another was, I swear, Capten Cronch.
Once, we passed a business that makes signs for a living. On their marquee was the word “crazy.” They wanted to elongate it, to prove how crazy the guy was. So the signmaker did - Crazzzzzy.
Today, we passed a bar, where it was Ladys Nite. Is that as in, “and The Plps”?
One of these days, this stuff won’t bother me. I’ll be dead.
A bar I frequent changed it’s name about 2 years ago. Sometime last summer they had flyers around the place talking about some upcoming event. There were horrible mistakes all over the flyer, but the one that stands out is at the bottom of the page it read “Formally the Park Bench.” Not formerly. Formally. Gah.
This is a bar that also had a big poster advertising “Ying Ling” beer. :rolleyes:
Not a spelling error, and it’s been fixed, but the Miss Vietnam sign in my home state caused some waves at first. Amazing how one bit of punctuation can make such a difference.
On my way home from work I sometimes (depending on my route) pass a recently-opened pottery and glassware store. I know it has opened recently because of the large, professionally printed sign outside proclaiming the store’s “GRAN OPPENING”
A church nearby where I live came into an endowment, or saved up, or something, but they tore down the old building and spent months building a new one. Finally it was done (cars started appearing in the parking lot on Sundays again) but for about a month, no sign. Then overnight, one appeared proudly emblazoned Church of the Reserection. A day or two later when I passed by, somebody was kneeling before it, trying to wedge in the another R. After that, the plastic vanished for a few days, then reappeared spelled correctly. The sign was professionally done, but somebody had to sign off on it.
My wife just reminded me of another one, probably the worst example we’ve seen.
There is a hairstyling salon here, in a neighborhood where mainly African-Americans live. I understand that they had their hearts in the right place, wanting to identify with Africa and the grasslands, so they registered their business and had their signs printed up to read:
Some of you folks might have heard that radio host Tom Leykis got into a little tussle recently in a bar here in Seattle. That same bar has a big neon sign that says, “We Cheat Drunks and Tourists Since 1923.” I appreciate the humor but grammatically, it’s so wrong.
I thought you were talking about the play until I read the article.
There’s a jewelry store downtown that caters to the wealthiest folks in the city. Sometimes they’re contracted to sell antique jewelry for these folks. The store had some little placards made up for the antiques, done in nice calligraphy, that read, “To Close Out A Estate.” **A ** Estate? They used these placards for years. Being suck a high class place, I could never figure this out. Did they not care that it was grammatically wrong or could they not afford to have new placards made? Strange.
There is a sign for a restuarant near my house that says, “The Tastetiest Tacos in Town!”
What’s truly sad is that while I knew instantly that there was a misspelling on the sign, I had to read it three times before I could figure out WHICH word was bothering me.
And just for fun, not a misspelling, there’s a sign up at the gas station down the street right now that says:
Over the Fourth, I took my kid to a county fair. There was a sign on the ticket booth advertising for bracelet day - $15 (those things got expensive, didn’t they?) and they’re good from whatever time until “ATE PM”.
I worked at a theater in Beverly Hills. The cast and crew was having a hard time finding parking spaces. The little Asian guy next door got fed up with us parking in his spots. One day a sign appears:
This one was actually my bad, but at least it taught me a lesson.
Years ago I was working at a bar that had local music every night. On the night in question we had a band playing called “Sombody’s Weird.” That day I was the AM bartender, so it was my job to change the marquee. After much deliberation about whether or not “Somebody’s” ought to be “Somebodys’,” or possibly, “Somebodies,” or maybe even “Some Bodies’,” I finally settled on “Somebody’s Wierd.”
Quite proud of myself for getting the “Somebody’s” part right, I was pretty embarrassed when the drummer* came in and said, “We’re not WIRED! We’re Weird.”
I haven’t spelled “weird” incorrectly since.
BTW, if you ever get the chance to hear Somebody’s Weird, I highly recommend them.
*While he’s a very nice young man, he’s also conclusive proof that Somebody really is Weird.
This one raised my blood pressure for quite some time – a poster on the subway advertising a new thriller novel about some mysterious ring of criminals. One of the lines read “THEY’RE SECRETS WILL AMAZE YOU!”
Well, maybe, because THEY’RE misunderstanding of they’re v. their already amazes me. The part that chaps my rear end is that this is an ad for a book, paid for by a publishing company. They ought to have a basic grasp of the editorial process, yes?
Don’t even get me STARTED on my days working in legal publishing! Far too many manuscripts appeared to use the same ghost writer: Jack Daniel. I once counted a “sentence” that was, no kidding, 660 words long - and I wasn’t permitted to change it. Argh! What was sad was how, after a few years of an onslaught of such drivel, even the most educated editorial staff members started to miss mistakes like “they’re” vs. “their” because they saw them so often. I escaped in the nick of time.
Last Fourth of July, the local flower shop advertised “Patriotic Bookay’s” for sale.
Living where I do, I get to see lots of fractured English being displayed in public. The one that takes the cake, however, is a recent one that was not only made by a major corporation, it went into their billboards and TV ads. You know, the stuff they spend over $1million producing? That maybe should be checked before they go out?
Anyway, it’s for a line of mints and gum called “Frisk”. It read:
Frisk Mints
Bran New
And no, there’s nothing about the mints that’s supposed to aid in regularity. Although the head of the company probably shit when he saw ads.