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.

The “mystery” of the Cold Storage logo is solved.

You know the logo of the Cold Storage grocery chain? No? It looks like this:

cold-storage-logo

I always assumed that green thing was an olive. In fact, I would have SWORN it was an olive. You could have won money from me on this. Now you’ve missed your chance.

Sometime within the past week or so, I asked my husband what he thought it was, and he said it was an apple. The penny dropped. An apple with a leaf makes so much more sense than an olive with a flame-shaped pimento…

I visited the Cold Storage website, and found this giant green-apple/red-leaf banner. So my husband’s eminently reasonable theory was confirmed.

I don’t understand why the leaf is red and the apple is green, because typically it’s the other way around, and it’s the weirdest-looking stylized apple I’ve ever seen, but an apple is undeniably what it is.

Schindler Lifts

This is the sign in the lift at Huber’s Butchery and Bistro. (In Singapore, where elevators are almost universally called ‘lifts’ because that’s normal in British English.)

It’s a laugh-inducing shock when you see a sign saying “Schindler Lifts” for the first time, since what immediately springs to mind is Schindler’s List, the 1993 Steven Spielberg movie about a German who saved the lives of over 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust.

You brain goes: “Hey! That’s almost a famous movie title! Did they do that on purpose? Are they making a joke about the Holoc—Aw, it’s probably just a normal family name in Europe and totally a coincidence.” Which it is. But then you take out your smartphone and take a photo anyway.

Then you realize that hundreds of people on the internet have already done exactly the same thing.

And then you think, so what? It’s all been done. That doesn’t mean nothing is worth doing.

Randall has the right idea in this webcomic.

There will always be happy opportunities to share things with people who don’t know what you know, especially if you spend time around small children. Practically everything is new to them! That’s one of the joys of teaching.

Mind your steps!

Broken idiom alert. This sign at the National Skin Centre pharmacy says:

CAUTION!
Tripping Hazard.
Mind Your Steps!

I think in the US we’d be more likely to say “watch your step” rather than “mind your step”, but pluralizing ‘step’ would be wrong in either case.

Sure, it’s logical that you’d want to be careful over the course of many steps, but conventionally, that’s not what we say.

I think we use the singular noun because this ‘step’ really means ‘manner of walking’. Here are some examples that showcase this singular sense of ‘step’.

The job promotion put a spring in his step.

The dancer has a graceful and lovely step.

The thief listened for the confident step of the policeman.

There is room for confusion because ‘step’ more often means ‘footstep’, and footsteps are often potentially plural, even when they are not syntactically plural.

The craftsman hoped his son would follow in his (foot)steps.

The sound of (foot)steps faded away down the hall.

Every (foot)step brought her closer to her goal.

Now that I think about it, the noun ‘stride’ has a similar duality: the singular noun means a manner of walking and the plural noun is used to refer to a series of individual movements.

I think there’s also pressure to pluralize ‘step’ coming from the common use of ‘steps’ to mean ‘stairs’.

The spilled water cascaded down the steps.

Anyway, the upshot is that the warning to “watch your step” or “mind your step” means “pay attention to your manner of walking”, not “pay attention to each of your footsteps”.

No Smoking Prohibited By Law

The sign says:

No Smoking
Prohibited By Law

But it should say:

No Smoking
By Law

or

Smoking Prohibited By Law

or

No Smoking
Smoking Is Prohibited By Law

Why? Because it almost sounds as if not smoking is not allowed. In other words, it sounds like everyone must smoke.

Obviously people are not really going to conclude that they must smoke when they see this sign, but all the same, the English is not quite right.

Dengue warrior

It would be hard to overstate the extent to which I hate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are deadly serious. But this banner is still funny.

For one thing, that warrior, with his Roman helmet, looks really out of place in Southeast Asia. The text at the bottom takes the cake, though.

It says:

SILENT WAR. FIGHT DENGUE. SAVE LIFE

Lists that aren’t parallel are a pet peeve of mine. Lists should be all nouns or all verbs. Here we’ve got a noun and two imperatives. Sigh.

Furthermore, that ‘life’ should be ‘lives’. The fact that it isn’t testifies to the frequency of singular/plural errors in Singapore.

And then finally, there’s no punctuation after the last item of the list!

I recommend:

WAGE WAR · FIGHT DENGUE · SAVE LIVES

Now I’m totally with you, out-of-place Roman centurion.