The misspelling of road markings is one of those stories which appears in the news every so often – this blog highlighted examples in 2011 and 2014 – but there was a particularly good one which came to light this week. What made this one a delight was the fact that it occurred outside a primary school where (I assume) spelling tests are taking place all the time:
The individual responsible was called back to correct it, though not before the school had taken the pupils outside to take a look at the error.
(‘What a fantastic opportunity for our learners to see that we make mistakes yet we learn from them to improve,’ said the headteacher.)
Personal experience suggests that spelling mistakes on road signs are becoming more frequent; I’ve recently spotted signs giving instructions to ‘pedestrains’ and warning of ‘tempory roadworks’. Here are a few more bungles revealed by a quick search on Google:
Admittedly the last of these examples (‘Sign not in use’) doesn’t include a spelling mistake, but of all the signs I came across it’s probably my favourite.
Of course, there’s always the caveat that some images may be fake (though I have no reason to believe that any of the ones above are). The poster below left recently went viral…
Unfortunately, it turned out that the original poster (shown above right) had been photoshopped; you’ll notice that the same car can be seen in the reflection next to the poster. Bummer.