Saturday, December 27, 2008

Slow as MOlASSES


The coffee shop I usually go to in Williamsburg, Brooklyn has been closing early during the days after Christmas, so it is a small miracle that I stumbled into The Rabbit Hole, a French inspired café just down the street, where I found this superb example of improperly used lowercase L's. The PUMKIN MOlASSES MUFFIN WITH WAlNUTS looks like a tasty treat, but I've been turned off to this savory snack because it reads like "Moi Asses", which could imply the muffins came from some French baker's derrière. And what if I had an allergy to walnuts and ended up in the hospital because I was misled by the unfamiliar non-allergenic "wainuts"?

I asked the barista about the sign, and he could only explain away the misspelled PUMPKIN, blaming it on the poor English of the Frenchman who might have printed the labels with the P-Touch. But I see this as a second-hand error, a literal interpretation in mechanical print that resulted from a horribly handwritten list, where the L's looked like uppercase i's. But why have the staff never bothered to correct these embarrassing blunders?

Curiouser and curiouser!

2 comments:

Roses said...

WAlNUTS is way-nuts!

::snickers and runs away::

Anonymous said...

If it were an American operating the labeller it would have been PUNKIN, you know.