It is the unalienable right of retired people to spend their days tut-tutting about the state of the world and remonstrating about the general drop in standards to anyone within earshot. Or, in the alternative, to pen outraged letters to the editor about the shocking loss of civility in current times.

Being loath to miss out on this activity, and noticing how many bizarre signs abound, signs that would never have been seen in my youth (like the above advertisement where a beautiful face was deliberately graffitied to sell a product!)  I thought it worthwhile turning into a fussy old pedant myself, and using this blog as my pulpit:

 #72 Discover Odd Signs

MISPRINTS

Is it my imagination or are there more egregious misprints nowadays?

Although having said this, I can’t tell you how exciting it was to find a misprint that described my fellow pedants so glowingly:   

But I did wonder where this restaurant goes on the other 6 days. 

Presumably to somewhere further away?

Misprints that sound real can be puzzling, like this one in an article about an Archbishop’s speech.

Verison sounds so much like a word one might find in the Macquarie dictionary, that I’ve decided to start using it to mean a misleading statement about faith.

Schools, above all others, should take care with spelling. One can only feel sympathy for young ‘Sohpie’, having her moment of glory spoiled like this.

I wonder if the two Sophies fought over whose name was the misspelled one? Or is it possible that somewhere, some 16 or 17 years ago, a father and mother decided to call their daughter Sohpie because no-one else in the class would spell it that way? (Speaking of which, is Aby really a name?)

Especially satisfying are those misspellings that throw up an incorrect, but real word that completely changes the meaning.The anti-abortion group mentioned are actually called ‘The Helpers of God’s Precious Infants’ but as legislation now prevents them standing directly outside clinics invading the medical privacy of the patients attending, maybe the misprint ‘previous’ is perfectly apt.

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ATROCIOUS GRAMMAR

Bad grammar can throw up some disturbing visual images:

Really? The bullets were singing Amazing Grace? Now that is amazing.

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TERRIBLE PLACEMENT

Poor juxtaposition of discrete articles can lead to unintended outcomes. I suspect someone’s head may have rolled when the bosses discovered this posted on an ABC news site. It was only up for about 10 minutes:

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DOWNRIGHT LIES

But the signs that really make me hot under the collar are the ones that lie.

First, there was this outside a shop in Balmain …

A shop that cared so much about their ‘beloved Balmain doggies’ that they didn’t even bother putting out any water!

Then there was the hoarding for Clive Palmer’s party, erected recently at the end of my street.

We’re supposed to believe that this man cares about farmers?

So I ‘virtually’ graffitied the sign at home on my computer to make it a little more honest, at least:

But before I had a chance to slip out on a moonless night with my hoodie and black paint and fix it in real time, someone else’s anger had spilled over and this was the result:

It wasn’t me, I swear!

And what about the house with a sign proudly calling itself Wisteria Lane but with not a flower or a vine or a trellis in sight:

Sorry, but if you’re going to call yourself by that name, at the very least you should look like this:

…taken at Tabletop by my Bunnings buddy

or this

Anything less is, quite frankly, misleading advertising and I’ll be writing a stiff letter to the editor about it.