Fritinancy

Violations

I stared at this parking-lot sign for a good five minutes, trying to figure out what it meant:

 

First I interpreted "parking" as an adjective modifying "vehicles." Dilemma: does that mean "vehicles in the act of parking" or "vehicles on official parking duty" (whatever that may mean)?

Got nowhere with that.

Then I read it as a prohibition of [the activity of] parking vehicles. But that would have required a singular form of "to be," right? Parking ... is prohibited.

But grammar be damned. Was this sign telling me I couldn't park on Berkeley Bowl property? There was ample physical evidence to the contrary: as usual, the parking lot was full. I even spotted a few motorcycles and mopeds. I parked; I wasn't towed.

So maybe the sign simply means "Don't park on the sidewalk." Which would have saved ink. And headaches.

Speaking of headaches, and disagreement, check out the caption on this photo in yesterday's New York Times Dining In section:

TONIGHT'S SURPRISES: The cost of specials aren't always divulged.

It's the cost, singular, that isn't always divulged. The specials (plural), we may assume, are revealed eventually. Prepositional phrases often confuse writers; a little sentence-diagramming would clear matters up immediately.

P.S. For those of you outside the Bay Area, the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace is one of our foodie meccas. If you think 18 types of bulk rice are just about enough, if you want first pick of local Gravenstein apples, and if you like to hear shoppers conversing in 10 or 12 languages as they survey the grass-fed buffalo steaks, this is the place for you. And for all the rest of you, too. The store got its name from its previous location, a decommissioned (dislaned?) bowling alley.

Try It with a Scramble't Egg

I've seen some oddly placed apostrophes in public places—who hasn't?—but never anything quite like this:

Questions, questions:

• Just one muffin? Is it really, really big? Did the cook get tired? Or quit? Is "muffin" now a mass noun?
• Why use two characters, the apostrophe and the t, when only one character, a d, is needed?
• Does this look vaguely Shakespearean? Maybe not—when Shakespeare used 't, he was forming a contraction with "it" (Love's Labours Lost, Act II: "Will you prick't with your eye?").

This sign has been bothering me since I first saw it more than a week ago. Botherment led to rumination about the English past tense, and rumination led to Googling. Here's what I learned:

From very early in the development of English, -ed was used to mark the past tense in weak (also known as "regular") verbs such as bake. By contrast, strong (irregular) verbs changed their vowel sounds— sing/sang/sung, for example. Dan Tobias writes:

Originally, the "-ed" suffix was pronounced as a separate syllable, but by Shakespeare's day it was commonly shortened to the modern form, and often spelled like "deceiv'd" to indicate this (and this pronunciation was denounced by linguistic purists of the day as sloppy).

Not Exactly Rocket Science informs us that:

In the Old English of Beowulf, seven different rules competed for governance of English verbs, and only about 75% followed the “-ed” rule. As the centuries ticked by, the irregular verbs became fewer and far between. With new additions to the lexicon taking on the standard regular form (‘googled’ and ‘emailed’), the irregulars face massive pressure to regularise and conform.

Today, some past-tense formations can take -t instead of, or in addition to, -ed. Consider dreamed/dreamt, leaped/leapt, burned/burnt. In these instances, the -t suffix is a marker of British English (BrE) spelling. But in others—slept, crept, kept—there is no -ed equivalent in American English (AmE). And in a few cases AmE uses one spelling for the verb form ("I burned the toast") and another for the adjective ("The carpet comes in the perfect shade of burnt orange").

Sometimes there's a little pronunciation confusion, too. The "baked" in "baked muffin" sounds like it ends in -t. But the "scrambled" in "scrambled eggs" ends with a -d sound. Yeah, go figure. 

So here's my theory. I'm guessing that the muffin man (have you seen him?) is a bit spelling-challenged but knows something about phonetics. He was thinking "BrE past-tense suffix"—maybe he's from England, or a Commonwealth country; maybe he learned/learnt English by correspondence course—but when he wrote "Baket" it looked funny, like "basket" misspelled (or misspelt). So he thought, what the hell, let's throw in an apostrophe, because apostrophes are the Band-Aids of spelling. Aren't they?

But I'll entertain other theories. Hold forth!

Bonus link: The apostrophes of Canada, or Canastrophes.

Photo: Pergamino Cafe, Columbus Avenue at North Point, San Francisco.

Oh, the Enormity

No, there was no Hurricane Hugh in the Bay Area:

Apparently the proofreader was indisposed for some other reason.

(Piedmont Avenue, Oakland.)

P.S. Yes, I know the difference between enormity and enormousness.

Change One Word...

...and you change your relationship with your customers:

"Greater" sounds better than "older," doesn't it?

Seven years ago, on my first visit to Portland, Oregon, I noticed that the transit district uses "honored citizens" to refer to seniors and people with disabilities. Very civilized--and charming.

(Counter sign snapped at Fenton's Creamery, a family-owned Oakland landmark for 114 years, most of them in my very own neighborhood.)

One X at a Time

Remember 360 Vodka's twist on the formulaic "X-ing the Y, One Z at a Time"?

(Sorry I couldn't find a bigger photo; the slogan reads "Saving the planet, one glass at a time.")

When I wrote about it last September, I cited ten other examples of this sloganclone (my term for a commercial snowclone--a specific type of cliché).

Here's a new variation I spotted the other day:

The snowclone "Changing the [world/earth/planet], one X at a time" appears to be more common than "Saving the [world/earth/planet], one X at a time" (584,000 Google hits for the first, with the "world" variant; 181,000 for the second). Snowclone queen Erin O'Connor includes "Saving the world, one X at a time" in her snowclones queue--a long list of snowclones awaiting analysis.

Crowd Control

Counter sign at Café Dibartolo, Grand Avenue, Oakland:

Get Thee to a Dictionary

If you're going to go churchy on us, watch thy pronouns.

Thou: subject ("Thou said WHAT?")

Thee: object ("Yeah, I'm talkin' to thee.")

Thy: possessive ("I see by thy outfit that thou art a cowboy.")¹

For shame!

___

¹ Update: As the Rev. Michael Penn Moore pointed out in an e-mail, that sentence should begin "I see by thine outfit..."Thy becomes thine in front of an open vowel. Aren't you glad English dropped the second person informal several centuries ago?

(Photo taken at Bay Street shopping center, Emeryville.)

Mr.-y Spot

I've been collecting photos of "Mr." brand names for more than a decade. (Not names like "Mr. Brown's Restaurant"; the formula has to be Mr.+ Product or Mr. + Service.) I was inspired to begin the project when a friend pointed out a Chinese restaurant on San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley called Mr. Eggroll. The "O" in "Eggroll" had fallen off, and all the remaining letters appeared to have been handcut from white sticky tape, but still--you had to admire that plucky honorific and applaud the attempt at dignity. (Both the friend and the business are now defunct, alas.)

I went on to document Mr. Lumpia X (a take-out place in San Francisco specializing in the Filipino specialty called lumpia; I have no idea what the "X" stood for), Mr. Hot Dog Rancho Burgers (confusing, yes, but a very handsome sign: Geary Blvd., San Francisco), Mr. Convenience (a Japanese store on Mason St. in San Francisco; "Mr. Convenience" was the only English in the sign), Mr. Sushi (Grand Ave., Oakland), and the unabbreviated Mister Softee, the ice-cream-truck franchise in New York and the Northeast.¹ Except for Mister Softee, none of these businesses appears to have survived. All of the photos are from my pre-digital period and thus unavailable for posting; one of these days I'll have them scanned.

Meanwhile, here are some current examples of Mr. monikers.

I shot this San Francisco establishment in 2005. But this photo, from the Yelp review, gives more context:

There's a #1 in the sign because there's also a #2 store, in Hayward. And the bling-bling in question is the kind you have installed in your mouth. As one satisfied customer put it on Yelp: "Listen, at some point in your life you may need to buy some gold teeth, and when you do, Mr. Bling Bling will be waiting like a prodigal friend. Seriously, this is the place."

On Fairfax Ave. near Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles:

   

Quite the dapper gent, eh? He's not to be confused, of course, with Mr. Clean®, a registered trademark of Procter & Gamble:

This Mr. is also in Los Angeles, on Santa Monica Blvd. near Western Ave.:

A coffee wholesaler in downtown Oakland, near Jack London Square:

I love that snazzy streamlined font. However, the company's logo on its web site is completely different. Time to hire a sign painter?

 

On University Ave. in Berkeley. Another fine retro typeface. I'm indebted to one of the Messrs. Rooter for his heroic efforts in removing a small forest from my sewage system a few months ago.

Anybody out there have a favorite Mister?

___

¹ "Mister Softee" is also stockbroker slang for Microsoft, whose ticker symbol is MSFT.

Signs from the Mysterious Southland

Test your L.A. IQ:

You are driving 35 miles per hour on Santa Monica Boulevard near La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood when you see this large sign:

What is the sign advertising?

A. A belly-dancing academy.

B. A cosmetic surgery clinic specializing in the rejuvenation of lady parts.

C. An ambitious one-named Brazilian model hoping to become a model-actress.

The correct answer is (D) None of the above. If you're curious enough about the sign, as I was, that you find a parking space, cross either of the very busy boulevards, and zoom in for a closer inspection, you see this:

Kind of downmarket-looking for a "premium experience." And "Famima" strikes me as too perilously close to "famine" to suit a sandwich joint.

Then there's the punctuation. I'd seen single exclamation points in business names--for example, BevMo!--but the double exclamation point is new to me, and peculiar looking.

The big green sign also displays a URL, which I neglected to photograph. When I got to a computer and searched for "Famima," I discovered the Japanese parent company's website, in Japanese. Famima USA is a little more helpful: I learned that the company has 13,000 outlets throughout Asia, and that Famima USA was established in 2004. The "Famima!! Difference" amounts to "redefining the convenience store." For example:

We don't just have soup, we have soup!!

Now!! I!! Get!! It!!

As for the name, here's the official story:

About 35 years ago, Famima!! started in a small Japanese neighborhood as FamilyMart. In fact, the name Famima!! comes from an abbreviation of FAMIlyMArt. Since then, FamilyMart has remained virtually the same, offering fresh goods, a selection of grocery items and popular quick-foods that can be eaten on the run or taken home as a meal.

"Famima" may sound yummy to a native speaker of Korean, Thai, or Japanese, but like several other imported names, in English it's ... not so good.

Nameless in Oakland

Taken on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. near 51st Street. The place was closed when I stopped to shoot the photo; I haven't been able to do any follow-up research because, you know, it's nameless.

(Across the bay, Sausalito's No Name Bar--no web site, either--has been pouring drinks and hosting  jazz gigs for at least half a century.)