ATTACK OF THE ALPHABET

I’d written this piece some time in February for the second issue of CATSCANNED, a fortnightly magazine edited by fellow blogger Bald Head Ate The Hermit. Found it in my hard disk earlier today while cleaning up my PC and thought “why not post it here”. So here it is…

‘Letters bring joy, write a letter today’. Thus reads an advertisement promoting the virtues of writing conventional mails. Though electronic mail has definitely relegated ordinary mail to the lowly status of ‘snail mail’, the advertisement does make sense to some extent. That is, if you are thinking more in terms of characters of the alphabet and not whole written messages.

Though our subject matter here can make no grandiose claims of bringing something as profound as joy to mankind, it definitely can make a chuckle escape our lips. A little act of omission, a slight change in the sequence of letter placement and, voila, there you have it – a perfect case of the printer’s devil glaring at you from a signboard.

While they can turn out to be nothing more than eyesore sometimes, those misspelled words, on other occasions, can lend a whole new meaning to the sentences that can amuse or abuse the reader, depending on which side of the fence you are on. If the guys entrusted with the job of painting signboards are allowed to have their way, they can sure come up with some rare gems. A few samplings are presented below for entertainment purposes only.

One of my personal favourites comes straight off the menu of a cafeteria along NH 31A which promises you a bite of ‘French Fried’. Yup, you read it right. The recently renovated café has a shiny flexboard menu right above the counter. There it is clearly stated in black and white, right below the picture of a plate of fries – French Fried. And then they wonder why foreign tourists hardly visit the joint anymore! Goodness, why would anybody want to be caught endorsing cannibalism in this politically correct age?

Gangtokians, it appears, are pretty adventurous when it comes to trying out new cuisines. Somewhere downtown at Tadong, there are people who offer ‘Cattering’ services, or at least that’s what the signboard outside the office declares. Now, does that mean they cater to the feline population or cater feline thingamajig to us?

Seen woven on a nylon doormat: Wellcome. Should this ‘footnote’ left there by the door deliberately by the host be interpreted as “Now that you are here already, well, come on in; what the hell!”

If those traffic police had their way, they’d strip us of our right to run around the Hospital Point. I kid you not! Not that we’d be running around there anyway but a signboard below the pedestrian overhead bridge says “No Right Trun”. Since the dictionary does not acknowledge the existence of the word ‘trun’, we can safely surmise here that the sign means to say No Right T’Run, albeit in a slightly archaic style.

One signboard that has still left me scratching my head for the past many years is the one near the SNT bus terminus. It boasts of a telecommunication giant having reached ‘Internet in all Distrist’. Is that… err… does that mean…err… Oh, whatever!

Signboards are not the only display cases for such bloopers. Both print and electronic media can be quite fun, or scary, if one is slightly attentive. Very recently, a television channel bungled up big time when they accidentally replaced the first letter of the word Chief with a ‘T’ while mentioning the political head of the state. After the headline made its first run in the news scroll, the mistake was realised and promptly rectified. If they had constituted an award for the biggest blooper of the year, this one would have bagged it hands down.

It is amazing how a simple slip of fingers, careless omission of a letter or our fetish for abbreviating words can end up with unprintable words/ phrases finding their way into print sometimes. Two unsavory samples: pubic [public] opinion and horny [honorary] secretary.

“It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your breath away” sang the Bee Gees. Words, especially those distorted by the printer’s/ painter’s devil, do take our breath away sometimes, but not necessarily in a sloppy, sentimental manner as the band crooned. Letters make up words and words are powerful tools. When carelessness creeps in while handling these magic characters, what we get is an attack of the alphabet. The letters go all wobbly and trip over each other, and cafeterias start selling French Fried to Frenchmen; and when someone’s chief ends up being someone else’s thief, it’s time we started paying a wee bit more attention to the way we spell.

Catscanned, March-April 2006