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.

This isn’t strictly a normative sign, but if you’re interested in normative signs, you’ll like this.

As reported by Business Insider…

In an effort to improve the manners of those using its metro system, the agency that runs public transit in Paris has created a “manuel de savoir-vivre” — an etiquette guide.

It’s not only excellent and helpful, it’s quite funny, thanks in large part to the illustrations.

This is one of those normative signs that reminds you that every rule has a history. It’s instructive to consider just what the problem was, here, that inspired someone to computer-generate a sign to post on a mirror.

The picture was taken at the nature center in Holliday Park in Indianapolis, IN. If I had to guess, I’d say that the problem was hikers washing their muddy boots, clogging the drain. In other contexts, such a sign might be de facto discriminatory, because some people (homeless people) don’t have anywhere other than public washrooms to do that sort of thing.

Thanks to Abe Schwab for sending the pic.

Here’s a sign superficially aimed at dogs. It’s situated out front of a shop in Copenhagen. Given the dog’s posture, it is presumably not intended to exclude dogs, but rather to discourage dog owners from allowing their dogs to ‘squat’ in front of the shop.

This is the sort of sign that makes me wonder what the story was. Just how bad does the problem have to be before someone posts a sign like this?

And just how effective is it? Is the kind of dog owner who would let his pooch poop on the porch likely to be deterred by this little reminder?

Also interesting: the sign says “No!” in English (rather than “Nej!” in Danish). Is English now widely-enough understood that normative signs are better off in that language than in the local tongue?

Thanks to Wayne Norman for the picture.

This sign is posted on the train from the Newark airport into Manhattan. It says “For emergency egress keep clear.” I wonder what proportion of people who ride that train know that “egress” is a slightly antiquated synonym for “exit”, rather than, say, the word for a female eagle.

It is said that the great showman P.T. Barnum, in order to avoid having people linger too long at his sideshow exhibits, posted signs saying “This Way to the Egress,” hoping folks would head to the exit thinking they were on their way to some fascinating new exhibit.

Thanks to Nancy Walton for the picture.

“No motorcycle stunts!” (Or at least that’s what this sign looks like at a quick glance. And isn’t a quick glance supposed to be enough for a non-verbal sign like this?)

It’s posted on the gate of a pay-parking lot in Toronto (at Yonge & Castlefield).