Tuesday, January 22, 2008

An Inconvenient Word?

Tonight at dinner, I went into the men's room at a local restaurant and saw an unusual thing: The baby-changing table was out of order. I don't think I'd ever seen that before, and I wonder how they found out that it broke; I hope that no actual baby was harmed in the discovery of this condition.

But what really made me laugh was the sign attached to it:

BABY CHANGING TABLE IS BROKEN
PLEASE DO NOT USE
SORRY FOR THE INCONVIENENCE

It seems to me that the word "inconvenience" gets misspelled all the time, especially in situations like this. Tonight's spelling was new, however; I usually see it as "inconvience." Is it that hard of a word to spell, or is it only hard when you're probably doing several things at once? (Note yesterday's discussion on multitasking.) And yes, I'm sure there are a zillion typos in this blog (in addition to the normal accidental leetspeak of things like "teh," my biggest one lately is typing "sqaure" for "square"), but to me that's a different kind of mistake than missing something on a handwritten sign.

Certainly, someone putting up a sign to tell people about an out-of-order object probably aren't worrying about their spelling, but the lack of same has caused quite a bit of amusement for me over the years. Perhaps my two favorites come from opposite ends of my life: One was this past year, when one of the drinks on a soda fountain was listed as OFF HORDER instead of "out of order," while the other happened way back when I was about nine years old, when we pulled up to a gas station and noticed that one of the pumps was BROKED. (And there have been lots of funny restaurant signs as subjects of this blog over the years.)

What is your easiest word to misspell, or mis-type? And what's the funniest misspelled word or awkward phrase you've ever seen on a sign?

Cool gadget of the week: Give it up for the world's first transparent toaster.

Honey, does this postcard make me look fat? Staffers of Dean Hrbacek, a Houston-area man running for Congress sent out a flyer with a picture of his head attached to someone else's skinnier body. Hrbacek (who used to be the mayor of Sugar Land, where my parents live) supposedly hasn't had time to pose for a full-body shot, according to his campaign manager.

No comments: