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    Misspelled School Signs a Common Occurrence

    By Molly Fergus | Yahoo! Contributor Network – Wed, Jan 25, 2012
    This story comes from the Yahoo! Contributor Network, where individuals publish their unique perspectives on some of the world’s most popular websites.
    Do you have a story to tell? Become a Yahoo! contributor

    It's like something out of a Non Sequitur comic: A street sign outside of a Manhattan school has misspelled the word school.

    Outside of Marta Valle High School on Stanton Street, the painted sign on the pavement notifying drivers that a school is nearby reads: "Shchool X-NG" NBCNewYork.com reports.

    Critics are saying that the sign is a, well, sign of the "dumbing down of American culture." The Department of Transportation counters that the mistake was made by a utility worker, not the city.

    The DOT says they're going to edit the mistake, but they're not the only ones in the country who could use a proofreader.

    The Palm Beach Post reported in October that a similar pavement painting in Lauderhill, Florida, also misspelled the word school.

    One block away from an elementary school, the pavement reads "scohol" in massive white letters. In this case, the county's highway officials called the incident "very, very rare," and noted that they simply hadn't reviewed the work yet.

    The Palm Beach Post article notes that this isn't Florida's first turn with an embarrassing sign. In 2009, Goulds elementary school in Miami-Dade country spelled it the exact same way -- "scohol."

    In 2010, the BBC got wind that a school in North Carolina had made the same dumb mistake. The school zone outside of Southern Guilford High School read "shcool" on the pavement, the same as the Manhattan sign.

    You could argue that we should give these pavement painters a little credit, given this surprising paragraph posted on Brain Connection (and circulated in many chain emails), in which almost every single word is misspelled.

    Our brains are so trained to skip the letters sandwiched between the beginning and end of a word that we often don't even notice when letters are switched around.

     

    1 comment

    • John
      John  •  4 mths ago
      Misspellings are more common on the news than on signs and street crossings. Even this article misspells the misspelling.
     Post a comment
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