Normative Signs: The Poetry of "Ought"

This is a picture of a warning sign inside the gears of an escalator in the building I work in. The escalator was under repairs.

The sign seems a bit like overkill, doesn’t it? It’s hard to imagine anyone being remotely tempted to stick their fingers into the gears of a machine capable of lifting a few thousand pounds of human beings.

Here’s a sign (or rather, a “sign”) posted on the fence of a Toronto school.

Presumably whatever it once said was not important enough to warrant keeping the sign legible. Of course, in posting this pic, I’m assuming that whatever it was said was something normative. It’s size and location make that a reasonable assumption, I think.

I suppose this sign is roughly as informative as yesterday’s sign.