I was reading Jeffrey Ricker’s blog, and he mentioned that at his gym, he recently noticed the signs “Mens Locker Room” and “Womens Locker Room,” with no apostrophes to indicate the words as possessive.
One of the most memorable mistakes I ever saw was when I was about twelve. It was Christmas season, and my father parked in front of a store with a huge sign in the window that advertised, “Neckless For Sale!” I still don’t know what creature was neckless; my parents refused to buy it because they said they’d be the ones who ended up feeding it. 😉
Do you have a favorite misspelled, poorly punctuated, or grammatically incorrect sign?
How about a spectacularly misspelled RV ad?
################
1979 ez ryder toyota moter home sleeps 4 self cantained ac 44,000 kl miles none smoker one owner very clean must see exlent condition 18 ft moter home. is in the city of camble
##################
camble = campbell, btw.
How exhausting to decipher! (Camble…giggle.)
Sign That Made Pre-teen Boys Giggle.
This one goes back 50 years when I was but a boy (12 or 13). My spinster aunt (this was long before I knew anything about lesbians.) had take me and my younger brother down town to the Famous-Barr department store (Now known as Macy’s) to shop for a birthday gift for our father.
There in the men’s department we discovered the sign — MEN”S DRESS SHITS. Try controlling a couple of boys on the bus going home. Our aunt never took us shopping again after that. It wasn’t until I was in Advertising Layout and Copywriting 101 that I discover the same store had made the same mistake in a full page ad for Arrow Dress Shits in the early 40’s. Our professor was the man who had written the original ad. He insists he typed it correctly.
Rog
Re: Sign That Made Pre-teen Boys Giggle.
That reminds me of a sign my parents once saw when they were traveling. Not a mistake, but one of those signs with the plastic letters, and someone had messed with it to make “Fresh catfish!” look like “Fresh catshit!”
Re: Sign That Made Pre-teen Boys Giggle.
I don’t know how I forgot my infamous one. A few years back I was sitting in Shaw Park with a friend of a somewhat intimate persuasion. He looked up at a truck passing down the street and said. “Boy, is that a laugh!” The sign on the truck — Bob’s Steel Erections!
Really Rob
Ha! @ “neckless.”
HA
too funny.
i HATE misspelled words. ok, i get that not everybody can spell with ease, but with spell check, an online dictionary, etc. i just dunno why the word in question can’t be looked up!
LOL..I see them all the time, but I try to forget them. None are popping into the noggin right now.
One day, on my way home from work, I passed a jewelry store. Under their permanent sign was one of those signs on which you can place letters and make your own ad message. Theirs said:
WATCH AND JEW REPAIRS IN TIME FOR XMAS.
Funny, I didn’t know I was broken.
Well, at least if you get broken, now you know where you can get fixed.
There was (and still might be) this restaurant called Kountry Kettle. Ugh! I can’t stand cutesy spellings.
I see them all the time in my writing classes. Just yetserday, I had a student writing a narrative profile about a strip club and he said something about being “necked.” When I asked, during his conference, which stripper he necked with, he looked at me like I was the idiot.
Hey! He’s writing about some beast that is the opposite of my neckless one! Haaaaa.
Oh… I guess I’ll have to go back and give him credit for my ignorance. LOL I’m AMAZED at some of the things I get.