Postcards from the Funny Farm

Since I got serious about college in my early 20’s, I’ve become somewhat of a hyper-corrective sign checker while driving in towns. When I point out a misspelled sign, I always get a kick out of it and of course have to point it out to my wife. I think her eyes get sore on trips from being rolled so often at my fixation. To me, it’s a blast. Anyway. It’s a fact that here in Victorville, there apparently hasn’t been the same level of concern about orthography. This is evidenced by our many abominable spelling mistakes in store signs, marquees, and the like. Off the top of my head, I’d say the possessive s is the most common culprit. Folks seem to be widely confused that the possessive singular gets ’s and it is only used for possession. A simple suffix s on the end of a word is used for plural nouns and single subject predicate verbs. EOS lays it out plainly here (as it always does).

I went URL hunting for good jpeg examples this morning and hit the proverbial jackpot. This guy I’ve linked below has spent an enormous amount of time on his site finding misspelled sign photos, hosting, and classifying them. HAIL! personal websites and blogs that provide such invaluable web 2.0 services. I put his site on my De.licio.us. Click through his pictures if you have the time, or bookmark his page and get back to it when you can It is a worthy piece of webwork to check out and a good laugh to boot.

Misspelled Signs - Page 1

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