Category Archives: Snotty Comments on NYC Signs

Mocking double meanings and pretentious language on street signs and ads

Organic Panic

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You can’t walk more than ten feet in Manhattan without seeing a sign advertising an organic product. According to the original, chemistry-class definition,  “organic” refers to any compound containing carbon. In recent years the “organic” shows up in connection with food produced “without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial agents.” Okay, no one’s against natural food (except perhaps some fertilizer/pesticide/artificial-agent manufacturers). But really, don’t you think the organic movement has stretched a little too far? This sign proves my point:

Shoes!

Shoes.

 

 

 

 

 

Buy these shoes in case you’re ever lost in the wilderness and have run out of regular (organic, of course) trail mix. You can eat your footwear without worrying about contaminating yourself with dangerous chemicals. Not that artificial ingredients would be your biggest problem in such a situation.

Moving on, here’s another organic offering, this time on the window of a barbershop. (Oops, I mean “salon,” which is what barbershops on the Upper East Side call themselves.)

Organic ammonia?

Organic ammonia?

 

Paging the punctuation squad: Clean-up in aisle three. I’ve given up on apostrophes, so I won’t go into “mens.” No one will misunderstand that word because it’s not properly punctuated. I’m also ignoring “natural cuts,” which are … what? Chops from falling trees? Thorn slices? But the absence of hyphens in this sign creates confusion. Is the shop offering “organic ammonia”? “Free hair”? “Free hair color”? And wouldn’t it be “hair coloring,” anyway? My guess is that the sign should read “organic, ammonia-free, hair coloring.” But even with the added hyphens and ing, the question remains: What does “organic” mean when the adjective is applied to “hair color”?

Another sign:

What's in this bottle?

Drink up whatever this is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hyphens, we need you again. Without hyphens, the bottle may contain smashed up “organic fruit” swimming in a chemical soup. Or the “beverage” may be organic, with fruit from pesticide-laced plants. The label implies health without giving any specific information, other than the fact that the US Department of Agriculture signed off on the designation “organic” for something. Alternate, perhaps correct labels: “all organic ingredients” or “made with organic fruit and some artificial stuff.”

One last thought: The New York Times reported this week that growers of medical marijuana cannot receive “organic” certification for their crops because the plant is illegal under federal law. Tobacco, the reporter pointed out, could conceivably meet “organic” standards set by the government. Which brings up an interesting question: Do “organic cigarettes” exist, and do they attract the healthy-eating crowd? Inquiring minds want to know.

Take a break from debate

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Pretty much everyone I know has been debating The Debate since it ended, analyzing every facial expression, body movement, and comment. It’s time to take a break!  Apply your analytical skills to these signs and answer the questions that follow. Send me your answers, but don’t expect any prizes. Sign number one:

Not an ordinary palm.

No ordinary palms.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Questions: Is your palm special? Is it worth ten dollars?

On to sign number two:

Shorten your doctors here.

Shorten your doctors here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What sort of alteration does this shop offer to professionals? Does it nip in a billowy lawyer, cut up a surgeon, or dye a mortician? OR – Do they think other shops employ amateur tailors?

And sign number three, from an awning on a busy Manhattan street:

 

Serving Manhattan's farm animals.

Serving Manhattan’s farm animals.

 

Does East 74th Street qualify as “country”? Do the proprietors believe that farmers will bring their livestock there? Or do the proprietors need “professional alteration” (see sign number three)?

Now for my favorite:

What's a "tworl"?

What’s a “tworl”?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is this a line from “Jabberwocky”? If not, what does it mean?

Bad Mood

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New Yorkers are not normally celebrated for their cheery outlook, and current events haven’t improved the mood around the city. So this photo, sent by my friend Catherine, seems particularly relevant right now:

All natural ingredients!

All natural ingredients.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gripe jelly – gives a whole new slant on “you are what you eat,” doesn’t it? If your New Year’s resolution was to be more peaceful,  you may want to avoid the jelly at this Lexington Avenue deli.

Moving on, here’s a sign from a truck parked on East 78th Street:

I can break my remote all by myself, thanks.

Remote control breaking?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was under the impression that most people break the remote all by themselves. I do it all the time, usually by dropping it in a bowl of whatever I’m eating while I watch TV. But if this sign is accurate, you can hire someone else for that chore. Busy New Yorkers, take note. Alternate interpretation: If it’s too much trouble to attend, say, a political debate and bang your head against the wall in frustration, a techie will break your skull with a keystroke at a distant (probably outsourced) computer company. How convenient.

By the way, if anyone actually understands the meaning of “remote control breaking,” please let me know. In the meantime, snack on some gripe jelly and enjoy your bad mood.

Curation Nation

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I spend a fair amount of time in NYC’s museums, so I’m accustomed to thinking of “curate” as something an art expert does. Indeed, the primary definition of this verb is “to select, organize, and look after items in a collection or exhibition.”  So I was surprised to see this sign over a display of snacks:

Separating forged from authentic potato chips?

Keeping the customer safe from forged potato chips.

Okay, back to the dictionary, where I found that you can curate “content or merchandise using professional or expert knowledge.” The sign is correct if a professional snackpicker selected the food. Cynic that I am, though, I couldn’t help thinking that the advertising and marketing of this merchandise benefited more from “expert knowledge” than nutrition and taste did. I declined to test my theory because a glance at the price tags showed that curated snacks cost a lot more than just-throw-it-on-the-shelf stuff.

Once the word was stuck in my mind, I noticed it often in The New York Times. Sometimes the definitions quoted above applied: “The web has gotten so big that you need people to curate it.” No argument there, unless you’re a fan of the candidates-are-from-another-planet sort of story, in which case you’re against the act of curating, not the use of the word.

Other “curate” sentences stretched the definition: “Sometimes you see veggie burgers made with 100 ingredients, a kitchen-sink burger,” she said. “It’s better when you curate a burger.” Here “curate” seems to mean “select,” but I’d opt for curating the ingredients of the burger, not the burger itself.

An even greater stretch shows up in this sentence:  “I started to curate this idea.” Now “curate” is closer to “create,” though you could make a case that the speaker sifted through many possibilities and organized the harvest into a coherent idea.

The one that really got me was a comment from a rock star: “I’ll curate my own brand.” Leaving aside the question of whether a person can or should be a brand, my best guess is that this sentence returns to the museum context for “curate.” The star sees herself as a work of art!

Anatomy Lessons

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Thousands of words have been written about the media’s tendency to present unrealistic body images. These signs are unrealistic, too, but in their own glorious way:

Where?

Where?

This shop apparently caters to customers whose toenails center around their spines. If that’s your situation, you’d certainly want a pedicure. Just think how uncomfortable it would be to settle into a chair, lean back, and hit a toenail.

Staying on the subject of feet, I can’t resist reposting this sign (see “Massage Tips”  at http://www.grammarianinthecity.com/?p=1253):

Front feet not included.

Front feet not included.

 

The hyphen in “back-foot” creates one description; therefore, this store massages only your back foot. Go somewhere else if your front feet are sore.

Here’s another sign that assumes some strange anatomical features:

How many upper lips do you have?

How many upper lips do you have?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, “upper lips” and “under lips” may be a general reference to body parts, not a strict count of what’s on a client’s face. But why the singular “chin” then?  A customer is more likely to have more than one chin than more than one upper or under lip, even in this city well supplied with supermodels who wear size zero. And what’s a “side face”? Is each side $10, or do some people opt for an asymmetrical look?

I’m not even going to speculate about the meaning of “Men Ear Wax or Thread.” But if you want to do so, go for it!

Numbers Game

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In the spirit of “five out of four people don’t understand fractions,” I present these gems from math-challenged sign-makers:

How much more or less?

How much more and less?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forgive me for relying on logic here, but isn’t “more and less” a contradiction? Perhaps the writer meant “more or less,” a description that could apply to a penny and to a trillion bucks. At least that interpretation might be true.  “More and less,” on the other hand, could only mean . . . well, what could it mean? Ideas welcome.

And then there’s time. Einstein’s theory of relativity (but not math) is alive and well in NYC:

Long week.

Long week.

 

The above photo is from a store named Muji, where a week lasts thirty days. One can only hope that the employees are paid by the hour.

The next sign proves that government is just as “innumerate” (the number version of “illiterate”) as private enterprise:

Weak on "week."

Weak on the definition of “week.”

 

If anyone tells you that government employees indulge in four-day weeks, especially in the summer, whip out this sign. In New York City, Restaurant Week lasts 26 days.

 

“Punctuation”; Puzzles.

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The title looks strange — on purpose — and it’s no stranger than the random addition or removal of periods, commas, and quotation marks in NYC’s signs. I wrote about the placement of periods in “Stop Full Stop” (http://www.grammarianinthecity.com/?p=1364). In this post I expand on the puzzles of punctuation. First up is this photo, which my friend Erica Berenstein sent me:

Can you spot the period?

Can you spot the period?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reluctantly leaving aside the issue of capital letters, I can’t figure out the marketing advantage of placing a period after “dream” and nowhere else. True, the list separates the clauses (subject-verb pairs), but then why place any periods at all in this ad?

Microsoft takes a different approach to punctuation, as you see in these messages that popped up on my screen during a recent update:

And the comma is there because . . .?

And the comma is there because . . .?

 

The first part of the statement seems to be a shortened form of “we are getting things ready,” an independent clause. But if that’s the intended construction, the rules of Standard English don’t allow you to attach the first independent clause to the second (“Please don’t turn off your PC”) with a comma. Another possible interpretation is that “getting things ready” is an introductory participle, in which case the participle should modify the subject of the following clause. The problem with this explanation is that the subject of “please don’t turn off your PC” is an implied “you.” But “you” aren’t getting things ready. Microsoft is, or so it claims. By the way, there’s a period missing after “PC.” With such attention to detail, the upgrade promises to be buggy at best.

Here’s another Microsoft gem:

windows2

 

 

Okay, the words make sense, and the sentence begins with a capital letter. It ends with . . . nothing. No period. No exclamation point. Not even a question mark, which, given the state of internet security these days, would be more than appropriate.

Last one. Can anyone find a reason for these quotation marks?

P1020112

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m stumped. Feel free to send in your theories, properly punctuated, of course!

Odds

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A quick search of The New York Times yields 137, 513 hits for the word “odd.” The earliest appeared in 1851, and the word shows up regularly thereafter – never more frequently than in this, well, odd presidential campaign. But this post isn’t about politics. It’s about the odd expressions I’ve seen lately, such as the one on this sign:

Non-renewal?

Non-renewal?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my apartment-rental years, I signed many leases, but never a “non-renewal” one. I wonder what this sort of lease stipulates. Your lease extends to never? Your new monthly rent is zero dollars? (See http://www.grammarianinthecity.com/?p=1477 for other nonsensical “zero” signs.)

Here’s another odd expression:

Specialized?

Specialized?

I saw this on the side of a truck. Apparently, the contractor “specialized” in bathroom renovations. Good to know, if you’re seeking a renovation in the past. Lacking a handy time-travel gadget, though, potential customers may see a problem here.

One more:

Apostrophe? Preposition?

Missing apostrophe? Preposition?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This sign screams “scam,” and not because of its odd wording, which I presume is the result of omitting the preposition “for” (I buy all cars for cash) and not an apostrophe (I buy all cars’ cash). But aside from grammar, who can buy “all cars”? And how much cash would it take? What would the buyer do with them? Odd indeed!

 

Thanks for nothing

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Recently I took advantage of New York City’s IDNYC program, which gave me an official photo ID and a raft of free membership offers to some of the city’s best museums. In redeeming one of those membership offers at an institution I won’t embarrass by naming, I received an email thanking me for my “contribution of $0.00” and telling me that donations such as mine “support the work of the museum.” If that’s true, the museum is probably nearing bankruptcy. Continue reading →

Magritte in NYC

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On this Bastille Day, I am pleased to report that Rene Magritte is alive and well and creating art in New York City:

"Ceci n'est pas une 'bike stand.'"

“Ceci n’est pas une ‘bike stand.'”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the sake of comparison, here is one of Magritte’s earlier works:

To see the original, go to Los Angeles.

To see the original, go to Los Angeles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In case you’re wondering about the power of art, I staked out this spot for a while, to see whether a bicycle would be chained to it.  New Yorkers do sometimes interpret a prohibition as a dare. But no bikes appeared. Either the sign is very effective or the glowering shop owner, who was standing next to this tree every time I passed, scares cyclists into compliance. Either way, enjoy Bastille Day. (Especially you, Don and Avram, my art historian friends.)