Saturday, October 23, 2010

Why sign painters need copyeditors


This bin caught my eye when I was walking past the UHM Art Building. "Noncombustibal" looked wrong, but I had to look up how to spell it. I think it would make a great spelling-test word (the correct spelling is "noncombustible"). The Art Department has a lot of bins with the same lettering, so even though the artist gets a "C" for spelling, he/she gets an "A" for consistency!

3 comments:

Cindy said...

I secretly wondered if any of my editing classmates would shed light into the dark corners of our campus art world. (If you want to feel good about your grammatical self, come read the text on our bathroom walls.)

You'd probably faint, Tisha, if you saw the e-mails that come directly from the department chair. I often feel embarrassed by the unforgivable grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors that plague the internal correspondence. So, it makes complete sense to me that we boldly stencil high-profile dumpsters with misspelled words to let the rest of the campus know, that spelling is not important when it comes to artistic creativity! ARGHHHHH!!!

Pat said...

I love you two girls :)

One day some years ago, I was walking in the hallway of Kuykendall and saw an office chair sitting by its lonesome.

Someone had made a sign and put it on the back of the chair: Stay broken. Another person--a budding editor, no doubt--had come along and crossed out the n.

Of course I went back to my office on the sixth floor and told the staff all about it ;-)

lisa said...

i saw this the other day and meant to take a picture, but was in a bit of a hurry.

great catch!