My Favourite Sign Ever

As I may have mentioned before, I was in Australia in 2000 visiting my good friend Tania. During one of our ventures along the east coast, we stopped in a small village for gas (correction: petrol). I was surprised when I went in to pay and the owner asked, "How much was it?" There were no computers inside to tell him how much we owed - we had to go back outside to look at the pump reading. Ah, how refreshing! Already charmed, imagine my giddy joy when Tania discovered My Favourite Sign Ever! Attached to the gas (petrol) station was a pink brick building with this sign:

Aside from the mixing of two languages and the hilarious combination of fast food and art (in French, no less! Verrrry fancy), there's nothing technically wrong with the sign. Tania and I started laughing the instant we saw it, and I'm still laughing after nearly a decade.

Your's and Mine

I found this ad in the paper a few weeks ago. I suspected the spelling wasn't the newspaper's fault because of the stylized text. (I've blocked out the phone number and address to protect the offenders from the flood of prank phone calls that would surely pour in after this post is read by my thousands of followers.... feel free to read sarcasm here.)

So since it was an ad for a local business, I decided to make sure I was ridiculing the correct party (and if I was wrong, I guess I'd "come in & browse" - ugh! A big sloppy thhhppt! at the cheesy drop-shadow and messy font, but that's another blog...). Upon arrival I saw this:

And as I walked up, this (it's like the apostrophe leapt off in protest):

 

Aaaaaannnd for good measure:

Fashion with experience? [indignant snort]  Well, I guess you don't have to be able to spell "red" to tell someone they look good in it. Oh my, snarky girl.

Wide Right Turn's

Caution! This vehicle may cause my friend Tara to have an accident in traffic. She took this photo in Vancouver a week before she knew I was blogging on the same subject (AHA! Proof that I'm not alone...).



Okay, the useless and offensive addition of apostrophes in "make's" and "turn's" is insulting to us grammar freaks... but maybe we should have a moment of appreciation for the period at the end of it. (Really? Do signs have periods?)

Soul Job

Trish passed this on to me - it's an article from the Victoria Times Colonist about a mega sewage treatment project in Victoria. Here's her comment:

Sewage and soul jobs - is that some sort of freudian slip? Well, it was for this report. Do you like the odd newspaper slip, oh queen of typ-oh! s? : )

And the link:

http://www.timescolonist.com/Technology/Capital+Regional+District+votes+favour+four+sewage+plants+billion/1655084/story.html

...for those of you who don't want to read it (the typo is in the 10th paragraph), here's the quote:

“The province would probably appoint a board, a quasi-public board... and they would be tasked with carrying out sewage treatment,” he [CRD chairman] said. “It would probably go out to a p3 proposal of some kind and our soul job would be as municipal councils to figure out how to raise the money to pay for it.”

Actually, it makes the CRD sound more caring and invested in the project - the peace of their souls is directly connected to the treatment of poo. Now that's civic dedication.

Rib's for the Kid's

I'm surrounded. When I head south I drive past Smitty's restaurant with its "Kid's Eat Free" sign, and when I head north I drive past Ricky's restaurant with its "Rib's" sign. I'm most offended by Ricky's sign, because just before they got "Rib's" wrong they got "Burgers" right! At that point the person writing the text for the sign (after all, three whole words and the first 2 fairly long ones) must have become tired, fallen asleep on his/her pen, and accidentally made an apostrophe-like smudge between the b and s, which the sign maker in turn misinterpreted. At least that's what I'm hoping. I admit I don't know how the sign making process works, but surely between marketing people, copy writers and sign makers, someone knew this was wrong...


Ugh!

Sloth

I recently took the facebook "Which of the seven deadly sins are you?" quiz. I am Sloth, as seen here (apparently Sloth is a sexy cartoon wearing fishnet stockings on her arms ...looking an awful lot like she's peeping through a hole in the wall...).

Actually, I'm not offended by the image (although definitely confused), but I AM offended by the accompanying write-up. Whoever wrote the quiz must also be Sloth. It seems that I am so...lazy... I need to "walk up", because I got stuff I do. (It's accurate here - I do got stuff I do, like eating, sleeping, working, ... the list could go on ... but I'm a ...Lazy..person.)

Fortunately there are (+) (it only took a few read-throughs to figure out that the + and - weren't just random typos), and thank goodness I'm such a relazed type of person, or I'd be pretty annoyed that you used "your" incorrectly and couldn't even type out the word "level". lvl? Did you clack this out in text mode on your cell phone? Were you driving, or maybe even sleeping?

Facebook, where are your filters? Quality monitors? Have I just identified a hole in staffing? Are you hiring?

Quiz creator, I (it's capitalized) dare YOU to get off the computer.

What is this blog about?

Appetizers, cutely shortened, is the one word I see most often butchered in menus, restaurant ads and billboards. Appy's (it should be appies -or I can even stomach appys) suggests that something belongs to the appy. "The appy's sauce was divine," or "The appy's spelling was incorrect," or maybe even "The appy's car was red."

I was in Australia in 2000, the passenger in a car driving by a four-story furniture store sporting a massive billboard that read, "SOFA'S". As we passed the corner, I turned and looked over my shoulder to see the same sign on the other side of the building: "SOFA'S". I couldn't help it - I groaned out a long, almost slow-motion, "Oh NOOOOOOooooooo......." For cryin' out loud - how much did they pay for those signs? Am I the only person who was offended? The chances of me buying a sofa in Australia were already zero - could I minus that?

Anyway, after I read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, I realized that I was not alone in my uppity self-righteousness. I also realized that I'm nowhere near as clever and funny as the book's author, Lynne Truss. So I called my blog "There's No Apostrophe in Appy's" because the misuse of the apostrophe is one of my pet peeves, and it's likely to come up once in awhile. But I have no idea what this blog is really going to be about. As you can see, starting a sentence with a preposition is not a problem for me - I am all for artistic wiggle-room in some cases, and a grumpy stickler in others - so this blog can't really be about grammar and punctuation.

Let's just see what evolves. If the blog doesn't, maybe I will.