Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Does it really matter? Either way, the glass is refillable. Not so with signs as I discovered recently.
There I was driving along by an orchard and I spotted a sign, a sign of two halves:
CHER
RIES
I'm sure they were very goodfruit indeed but the jury is out on the sign. I think I would have sawed off the bottom half and attached it to the right hand side. Or turned the board on its side and gone with landscape instead of portrait.
Then I found myself following a car, the number plate of which was MRSHUG. There were two possible halves to this. Was it MRS HUG or MR SHUG? I'll probably never know.
The week before that I was driving across the Pahiatua Saddle and spotted a roadside sign, the left half of which was obscured by tree foliage, so it read:
Then I kept my motoring mind amused by thinking of other signs which could suffer from tree overhang or any other form of obstruction. STOCK EFFLUENT DISPOSAL, depending on arboreal obstruction, could read:
LIVESTOCK
FREQUENT
AS USUAL
And, what fun! EMERGENCY STOPPING LANE could be:
BOUNCY
BUMPING
LANE
LEFT TURNING TRAFFIC could become:
SOFT
APPEALING
FABRIC
The possibilities are endless. It all comes down to the amount of foliage overhang.
WRONG WAY GO BACK could become:
BAD PONG
THATAWAY
UNDERGO
BACKTRACK
I promise I'll stop on this red light. STOP ON RED SIGNAL could be:
LOLLIPOP
OFFERED
OPTIONAL
But enough of these merry musings. Let's move on to the serious stuff, which is real signs that are funny without having to rely on bits being obscured. They can state the obvious: CAUTION. WATER ON ROAD DURING RAIN.
They can have errors: PLEASE SLOW DRIVELY or RIGHT LANE MUST RIGHT LEFT.
They can be very badly worded: CAUTION. SLOW KIDS ON ROAD WITH NO SHOULDERS.
They can be blunt: DO NOT ENTER. GPS IS WRONG. Or ACCIDENTS PROHIBITED ON THIS ROAD.
Or, painted on a garage door: NEVER EVER EVER EVER NEVER EVER NEVER EVER EVER PARK HERE.
Or they can be funny. The person who created this for one of those large electronic roadside signs certainly had a sense of humour. It appeared during heavy peak-hour traffic:
YOU'LL NEVER GET TO WORK ON TIME HA HA!!
This one appeared just before congestion:
PREPARE TO BE ANNOYED
I would now like to offer two that address the issue of people who cannot take their eyes from their screens, something which is very relevant these days. This one graces a crossing at traffic lights:
HEADS UP
CROSS THE STREET
THEN UPDATE FACEBOOK
And this one from outside a church that might be suffering from a shortage of patrons so wants to save potential congregation members:
HONK IF YOU LOVE JESUS. TEXT WHILE DRIVING IF YOU WANT TO MEET HIM.
But I started with semi-signs so let's return to them for some sort of vaguely relevant conclusion. Let the imagination run riot – for these are not real – on signs that have been left half-finished.
Maybe it reached knock-off time so the sign writer left the rest to finish the next day. (Yes, I know they would be finished in a workshop before being put in situ but who wants to spoil the fun?)
ROAD LIABLE TO
BEWARE OF
SHARE THE
PLEASE USE
WELCOME TO
ROAD
SLIPPERY WHEN
DON'T
THIS COLUMN IS ABOUT TO
Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.
