It was Mother’s Day yesterday, in the USA. We had ours weeks ago.
This cartoon, courtesy of a tweet by the QI Elves (@qikipedia), is relevant to our purpose!
A man’s mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault. [Walter Bagehot]
As you will see, if you look very carefully, there are four words on this road-sign. Rothschild and Schofield are suburb communities of Wausau, Wisconsin, about 140 miles north of the state capital, Madison.
When it appeared, back in 2009, there was a round of buck-passing between the Director of the Bureau of Highway Operations for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (the bigger the title, the more nugatory the man), the sign-makers and the installers.
Local Police Chief Wally Sparks had the last, but not very original, laugh. ”It’s funny because the Department of Transportation actually administers a program for the preliminary breath tests we use for alcohol, and maybe they could give one to the company and have them check out some of their employees when they come in in the morning.”
Perhaps the road-sign makers of Wisconsin should be congratulated on, at least, managing to spell the word ‘Exit’ correctly.
There’s an old, and rather lame, tradition of deliberately mispronouncing the name of your enemy to indicate your contempt. Winston Churchill, for example, would always talk of “the Naaarhzies”. This was, of course, deliciously parodied by Kenneth Mars (as Franz Liebkind) in The Producers, here (at 2’45″).
Well, it’s one thing to say it, and another thing entirely to put it into print. When you mis-spell your opponents’ name in print, it just looks kind of – well, you know – sloppy:
Which prompted this correction:
As it happens, the Green Bay Packers did advance to Super Bowl XLV in Dallas, where they beat the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25.
