There’s nothing like an oddly phrased headline to brighten your day. How about “Actor Sent to Jail for Not Finishing Sentence”? Or “Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped”? Same for signs that make you do a double take, like “Senior Citizens! Buy One, Get One Free.” A San Diego caller shares a couple of her favorite oddly worded signs, and the hosts mention a few of their own. By the way, for more strangely worded signs, check out The Bad Sign Brigade on Flickr. For amusing headlines and unfortunate journalistic locutions, we recommend the “Sic!” section of Michael Quinion’s newsletter, available from his site, World Wide Words. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Oddly-Worded Signs”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Karen. I’m calling from San Diego.
Hi, Karen.
Hi.
Well, you know, this is something that I don’t know if it’s my old expository writing teacher that got me thinking about this, but it was dangling modifiers and how they can be used a lot in public signs or newspapers. And they can even be kind of humorous, but they’re because they end up not really saying what they were intending to say.
And I have one that I just thought you guys probably had some funny examples, but the one that I have in the elevator where I work says something to the effect of, this elevator sometimes lurches when it first begins to operate. Please hold on to the rail when using the elevator for your personal safety.
When you’re using the elevator for your personal safety? And I always think every time I get in this elevator, and maybe it’s me being overly logical, but I thought, I’m not using the elevator for my personal safety. I’m lazy. I’m using the elevator.
And then I found one also in the newspaper that said, a soldier in Iraq helps to deliver a first baby in Virginia. And right away I thought, wow, I would have thought a baby had been born in Virginia a long time ago. But they have really long arms.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, headline speak tends to lend itself to these, doesn’t it? Because they leave out articles and pronouns and prepositions and the whole thing.
Yeah, I always liked actors sent to jail for not finishing sentence.
That’s great.
There’s a place that I go when I want to find a lot more of this kind of thing, and not just dangling modifiers, but just bad signs in general, and it’s to Flickr, the photo website. Do you know it?
Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of it. F-L-I-C-K-R. And there’s a whole bunch of groups there that do this. One of them is called the Strange Signs Pool. But the best one is called the Bad Sign Brigade.
So you just go flicker, look for Bad Sign Brigade. And it’s image after image of just signs where somebody just wasn’t. They were on the clock, but they weren’t on the job, if you know what I mean. They weren’t doing it. They weren’t doing it.
So Michael Quinion of the World Wide Words newsletter, Google him. That’s Q-U-I-N-I-O-N. He takes submissions of this sort of thing from his readers, so he always has a whole bunch of this wonderful stuff where you can get a little giggle.
Oh, that sounds good.
Yeah, like Queen Mary having bottom scraped. I love that one.
Yeah, I’ve seen ones where they show inappropriate use of quotes where I think it said security guard, and for some reason they put quotes around it. And so the question was, is here a security guard? They need an elevator for their personal security, obviously.
That’s right.
Well, thanks a lot.
All right, Karen. Thank you so much for your call.
All right. Take care.
Bye-bye.
There’s one that I saw this week on the Bad Sign Brigade. It says, part-time chefs and cooks required must have a good understanding of English, but of course chefs and cooks have apostrophes in them.
Oh.
Anyway, if something like this has caught your eye, give us a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673, or you can email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.
