Tag: signs

I tend to notice mistakes on signs. Sometimes the mistakes make me feel frustrated, but usually they fall somewhere on the spectrum between interesting and hilarious.

IKEA opens daily

I’ve posted about errors in signs declaring business hours before. A giant European home furnishings company you may have heard of is among the businesses that have gotten it wrong.

Why should the phrase be “open daily” and not “opens daily”? Because one is idiomatic and one isn’t; or if you prefer, “open daily” has been idiomatic longer, since the sign is, itself, evidence that “opens daily” has become idiomatic in Singlish.

The best I can do for a usage citation is a couple of dictionary entries for “daily”, which give “open daily” as an example, suggesting that this is the most natural and intuitive phrase, as far as dictionary writers are concerned.

Then there’s the fact that the phrase “opens daily” gets Google 253,000 hits whereas “open daily” gets 10,800,000. The images for “opens daily”, in comparison to the images for “open daily”, are telling, too.

(New can of worms: I see that there are signs for “open everyday”, which should be “every day” because “everyday” is an adjective…)

Leaving aside calls to authority and statistics, the syntactic difference is interesting. “Open daily” uses “open” as an adjective, and “opens daily” uses “open” as a verb. We want to know when the business is open. We do not care when the door of the business is opened by some employee with a key. The emphasis is misplaced.

There is a further confusion lurking under the surface, which is that when we do use “open” as a verb for a business, we sometimes mean it in the sense of “to launch” or “to open for the first time”. So the phrase “opens daily” makes it sound like maybe the business is having a grand opening every day, which is ridiculous. Grand openings are not everyday occurrences.

You can use “open” as a verb if you really want, especially in a sentence rather than as a notice on a sign. But I think the verb needs a strong contextual justification.

Example Business
Opens at 9:00 a.m.
Closes at 5:00 p.m. Monday to Thursday
Closes at 3:00 p.m. on Friday

opens-daily

The Ikea sign is particularly bad because of the colon.

Opens Daily: 10am to 11pm

The text suggests that the door is opening (and closing) continuously from ten in the morning to eleven at night! Why? Because there are two adverbs modifying the verb “opens”: the word “[once] daily” and the phrase “[from] 10am to 11pm”. The first can legitimately indicate when the business opens; but the second is meant to say when the business is open.

This is what I think the sign should say:

Open Daily
10 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Please tear sideway

Georgia-Pacific is a paper company headquartered in my hometown, Atlanta, Georgia. The Georgia-Pacific Tower, a pink granite building shaped like three tiers of steps, came into being about the same time I did. It’s my favorite skyscraper in the city. I was in it once, way up high, for a job interview.

Now. The sticker that says “Please tear sideway”, spotted on a Georgia-Pacific paper towel dispenser in a restroom in the Singapore General Hospital complex, did not come from where I came from. I don’t know where it came from, but it did not come from Georgia.

Release level to stop

Since the picture is too far away and blurry, you’ll have to take my word for it that these are the steps for using this Downtown Line fire extinguisher:

  1. [pull out the pin, presumably]
  2. AIM AT BASE OF FIRE
  3. SQUEEZE LEVEL TO DISCHARGE
  4. RELEASE LEVEL TO STOP

(I’m pretty sure they meant “lever”.)

Hang on, I’ve got a slightly better photo:

16 Sep 2017

Here’s the extinguisher in my lift lobby (which says “lever”):

16 Sep 2017

“Dr Bags is the trusted aesthetics clinic for your designer bags.”

I didn’t know designer bags needed an aesthetics clinic, but that’s probably just because I don’t own one.

Unless the upcycled seat-belt kind counts. (Probably not.)

Anyway, I’m posting this photo because I was surprised to see the word “ain’t” used in a Singapore ad. It struck me as especially strange because the ad is for a luxury service. Not, you know, grits or cornbread muffins or something similarly folksy and homey.

The ad says:

It’s not luxury if it ain’t clean.

After I thought about it, I realized there’s a third level of weirdness, which is that the first half of sentence uses “it’s” and the second half of the sentence uses “ain’t”. I guess I would have expected two uses of “it’s” or two uses of “ain’t”, not one of each.

But maybe the contrast between the two contractions explains the whole thing.

The more standard word “it’s” goes with the idea of “luxury” and the more casual word “ain’t” goes with the idea of “not clean”.

Or I’m overthinking it.

…In Fact, It’s Our Specialty!

When I was a teacher, some of my students would bring to class bags displaying the name, logo, and endlessly amusing tagline of Tien Hsia Language School.

So finally I took a photo of the exterior wall of one of the Tien Hsia centers.

I think “Tien Hsia”, or 天下 (pinyin tiānxià), means “the world”.

No durians on trains! (Apparently they still have to remind people.)

Much has changed in Singapore since my husband and I arrived in 2008. But one thing hasn’t: the fines for these four public transit–related transgressions.

  • No eating or drinking (Fine: S$500)
  • No smoking (Fine: S$1000)
  • No flammable goods (Fine: S$5000)
  • No durians (?!?!)

We can only imagine the punishment for bringing a durian on this Downtown Line train…

And by the way, how exactly did it come to be that a hamburger is the universal sign for “food” on “do not eat” signs the world over? That picture is a hamburger, right? And it’s everywhere, isn’t it? Why?

No Admin Fee and GST

This is a sticker on the inside of the window in a taxi. It says:

NO ADMIN FEE & GST
when you pay with Dash!

Even assuming you like the ampersand in this font (I don’t), the conjunction needed here is ‘or’.

(No admin fee) and (no GST) => No (admin fee or GST)

The sign that says “no food and drinks” is also wrong for the same reason.

However, “Don’t leave your handphone & wallet behind”, assuming we find ‘handphone’ acceptable, sounds fine, since ‘handphone’ and ‘wallet’ can easily be considered a pair of items that would be forgotten together.

dont-leave-your
“Record shows 50% of the reported lost cases in taxi are Handphones and Wallets” on the other hand, has several problems…

I would rewrite that as follows.

Records show that 50% of the items reported lost in taxis are mobile phones and wallets.

On the other hand, I like the ampersand on this half of the sign much better. Even if it is crowding the descender on that letter ‘y’.

Wear and use your personal protective equipments

Pluralized uncountable nouns are a pet peeve of mine. The one that’s most frequently publicly wrong is ‘equipments’ because it’s posted at every construction site, and there are a lot of construction sites.

equipments
apparels
cutleries
furnitures
cuisines (meaning ‘dishes’)
slangs, jargons

I’ve also noticed uncountable nouns being used in the singular, which is just as wrong.

a bread (meaning ‘a bun or roll’)
a paper (meaning ‘a piece of paper’)

There are many words that are countable about half the time and uncountable about half the time, which I’m sure doesn’t tend to help people to understand the underlying distinction.

effort / efforts
content / contents
experience / experiences
praise / praises
detail / details
instruction / instructions
input / inputs
dialogue / dialogues

Recently I saw an email from a marketing agency in which the text of the ads was referred to as ‘ad copies’ instead of ‘ad copy’. Ack, no.

Fighting such errors may be impossible in the long run, because in principle there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to say ‘equipments’, and obviously people here already feel perfectly free to do so. Until uncountable nouns die off completely, though, you’re better off knowing how to use them correctly.