Normative Signs: The Poetry of "Ought"

Here’s one of those often-fascinating custom-printed-after-the-fact signs. It was posted in a building housing professional offices, in a town in Virginia.

The sign is baffling, at least to those of us who don’t happen to know the history. I always love looking at signs, and imagining the day when finally someone just couldn’t take it any more and felt compelled to word-process and print a sign…and then tape it to a wall with blue masking tape.

I also love the extravagant politeness, in which I detect no sarcasm nor suspect any.

(Thanks to Thea E. Smith for sending the picture.)

Not all of these are normative signs, but if you’re interested in normative signs, you’ll like these:

“Someone has made fake London Underground signs, and whoever did it is a ruddy genius.”

(Thanks to loyal reader Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay for sending the link!)

Wheeeeeee!

Given the exuberant pictogram, this CAUTION sign (on the campus of Duke University) looks like it’s cautioning against something a lot more fun than slipping and falling.

Thanks to Wayne Norman for sending the picture.

Is it just me, or are 2 of the words in this sign redundant?

Once you’ve said that something is “reserved,” that pretty much means “strictly” (is there such a thing as “sort of” reserved?). And the same goes for “only”. The word “reserved” means “only these people can use this.”

The picture was taken outside a grocery store in Toronto.

At a construction site in Niagara Falls, Ontario.