Parking Sign Contradiction

Well...which is it?

It is Wednesday at 1:30 in the afternoon, am I allowed to park here or not?

According to the top sign, I am.

According to the bottom sign, I am not.

*Because this photo was taken at my boys' school, I figured I should post it while they are on spring break.

The Semiotic Orthography of Leetspeak

A while back I posted about the semiotic use of the number "3" for the letter "E" in the title of an album by T-Pain. There is actually an orthographic computer language called Leetspeak that uses numbers and characters to replace as many letters as possible in a computer communication.

S3mi07i(5 i5 7-3 br4\(- 0f 1i\gui57i(5 7-47 i5 (0\(3r\3d wi7- 7-3 r3147i0\5-ip b37w33\ 4 5ig\, w-47 7-3 5ig\ r3pr353\75 4\d -0w p30p13 i\73rpr37 7-3 m34\i\g 0f 7-3 5ig\.


Leetspeak was named after the "elite" status classification used on bulletin board systems in the 1980's. The unusual orthography was originally used to encrypt communications but it also became a way to indicate a person was knowledgeable about computers and the culture of computer users.

Cognitive Linguistics Fun

Read the text inside the triangle out loud.

More than likely you said, 'A bird in the bush,'! and. ........
if this IS what YOU said, then you failed to see
that the word THE is repeated twice!
Sorry, look again.

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Count every ' F ' in the following text:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS...

How many?
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*


Wrong, there are 6 -- no joke.
Read it again.
Really, go back and try to find the 6 F's before you scroll down.
The reasoning behind is further down.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

The brain cannot process 'OF'.

Incredible or what? Go back and look again!!
Anyone who counts all 6 'F's' on the first go is a genius.
Three is normal, four is quite rare.



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Ribbit. Chirp. Ka-Ching! - Onomatopoeiac Casino Advertising and Billboards

This is a screen shot of a print ad from an advertising campaign for the Saganing Eagles Landing Casino in Standish Michigan. The campaign also includes numerous billboards on I-75. I get a kick out of the effect the onomatopoeias have on the semantics of the advertising message.

Slot machines really can be animals.

A Green Living Board Game

A good friend of ours created a new board game because she thought it would be a fun way to teach her children about the environment and how to protect it.

I just finished playing It's a Green Life! with my husband and boys and we all thoroughly enjoyed it and learned many new ways that we can pitch-in to make a difference. The point of the game is to race from a recycling center to a green planet Earth. A player advances through the 52 spaces on the board (which represent the 52 weeks in a year that people can follow environmentally friendly practices) by drawing cards that either reward them for being environmentally responsible or correct them for making mistakes. The reward and correction cards include tips about different environmentally friendly practices and they list the number of spaces a player will advance or move backwards.

Here is a link to the It's a Green Life! website. The game can be ordered on line and special pricing quotes are available for large quantity orders.

New Word, New Day - National Pantsing Day

As I drove my boys to school this morning they informed me that today is National Pantsing Day. National what day? Pantsing is a new word on me so I came home and looked it up. Here is the top definition from Urban Dictionary -

Pantsing: What many high school students will do to fellow classmates if they decide to wear sweatpants. It is far to easy to catch the wearer of the sweatpants off-guard and pull their sweats down. Any other form of clothing on the bottom is not to be messed with.....only sweatpants.
Poor girl decided to wear her sweats today; she's probly going to get......oh, and the pantsing begins.

This definition was posted by Whitney on May 23, 2005.

According to my boys, any pants will do; the pants do not have to be sweatpants. Either way, I learned a new slang word today and I got a good laugh at poor Whitney's spelling errors (probably because it was just too easy).

And by the way, as far as I can tell there is no such thing as National Pantsing Day...it must be something some smarty pants at my boys' school invented.

Bad Advertising - Billboard Semiotics and Pragmatics Fail

Take a close look at the bottom billboard and think about what each symbol might represent and what the sum of these symbols is intended to communicate.

Now, picture driving at 80 miles an hour and trying to figure out not only what each symbol might represent but also what the sum of these symbols is meant to communicate.

As mentioned in a previous post about a billboard pragmatics fail, the context in which a communication occurs plays an important role in a reader's ability to interpret a writer's intended meaning. The context here is the side of an expressway. Any reader in a car going 80 miles an hour or more is going to have an awfully hard time interpreting the writer's intended meaning because at that speed the reader will have a very short time to view the symbols. Not to mention that this doesn't even take into account the possibility of a semi truck obstructing a reader's view.

As for the semiotics fail, the symbols were so poorly executed that my first guess was:

beak + carrot ('s) + rake + "in" + rolling pin

Oh...how wrong I was and and oh...what bad advertising.

Upon seeing the billboard a third time I realized - the bird is a duck and the arrow is pointing to its bill, the carrot is supposed to be a surfboard and the last arrow is pointing to a blob of dough, not the rolling pin.

bill + board ('s) + rake + "in" + dough

So the writer's intended meaning was, "billboards rake in dough."

Okay, maybe I should have realized that was a duck the first time but I was driving and reprimanding kids at the same time. Plus I still think the second symbol looks like a carrot everytime I pass it.

Did I mention the apostrophe error? Does the billboard own the rake? The writer should have used a "+ s" not a "'s"

Related posts:

semiotics definition

additional semiotics posts

additional billboard posts

billboards advertising billboard advertising

Go Lay an Egg

With all of the fun we have been having recently discussing laying and lying, I can't resist sharing some egg humor that my husband emailed me a few minutes ago.

What did the egg say to the boiling water?

It’s gunna take me a while to get hard – I just got laid

Of course, if I had written the joke I would have said "It's going to take" instead of "It's gunna take."

Language Peeves - Where Are You At?

From a reader -

I used to monitor the HAM 2-meter frequency which is for local radio communications. Most of the people asked location by saying, "Where are you at?" I always wanted to ask, "What's the difference between 'Where are you?' and 'Where are you at?'"

The word where, by semantic nature, includes the preposition at, so asking someone where they are is the same as asking "at what location are you?"

That said, it would be redundant to ask the question, "At what location are you at?"

For the Love of Facebook - I Couldn't Care Less

Take this quiz to find out which male celebrity would best suite you.

A man who could careless...but still looks good, of course!

The word could is a modal verb and a modal verb always modifies a main verb. The word careless is an adjective not a verb. For this reason, I'm sure that the writer of this quiz intended to use the two separate words "care" and "less" with the modal verb could modifying the main verb care.

A man who could care less...but still looks good, of course!

By the way, "could care less" is an idiom that indicates a lack of interest in something. Of course, it should be noted that this idiom originated, and makes much more sense semantically, as "couldn't care less." Think of it this way - if someone "could care less" it means that they do care to at least some extent whereas if someone "couldn't care less" it means that it would be impossible to care less because they do not care at all.

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I know that Facebook quizzes do not suite me because they are filled with so many errors that they make my head spin - punctuation, grammar, spelling, capitalization...the list goes on and on.