Normative Signs: The Poetry of "Ought"

Here’s a category of normative sign I haven’t dipped into here, until now.

It’s the ad hoc sign printed on a basic office printer.

This one says, “Please do not lift by lid.”

It’s posted next to a bunch of candles-in-jars, for sale in a small department store in Surfside Beach, South Carolina.

I love signs like this; they smack of exasperation, perhaps desperation.

The subtext of a sign like this is always, “People keep doing dumb stuff. The people who designed this product, or this place, or this display, didn’t foresee this obvious problem. So we’ve resorted to printing a damned sign ourselves, to warn people against doing the stupid thing they insist on doing.”