ClEANING House

Okay ... wtf is this? Is this a backwards uppercase L? If I had to guess, I'd say it looks like our eager housecleaner, Vanesa, started with a lowercase L, and then decided to make it an uppercase L after the fact. And maybe there wasn't enough room to do the horizontal squeeze, so the lower rung had to be drawn backwards. I suppose we could call her and ask what the L she was thinking.

license to ill

Submitted by Lilit, this awkward "Dogs and cats need a licence" sign doesn't exactly meet the criteria for a genuine lowercase L offense here, but it is an interesting find nonetheless. Posted on The anti-social event of the season, a blog about kerning, punctuation, and other printed text problems, the author takes umbrage not with a lowercase L amidst uppercase letters, but with an unusually tall lowercase L. Other readers noticed that licence was spelled incorrectly.

TOTAl Recall

Adam Wells of Leeds returns with another submission, and this time it's real:

Early one morning the other week whilst filming up on the beautiful
Blackheath near Greenwich in South London, I stopped to get breakfast for the crew. The Blackheath Tea Hut is exactly that, a hut on Blackheath selling tea (in addition to bacon sarnies, egg rolls etc.) The power of electricity has not spread to this makeshift foodshack, nor had the technology of a cash register so a hand written receipt would have to suffice. Imagine my delight at seeing the £11.80 scrawled beautifully under 'TOTAl'. Genius. With a nod and a wink, I went on my way - fed, watered, and warm inside.

SMAll packages

When I ordered some kosher Chinese take-out at Gan Asia on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, who knew what fortune would fall upon me before even opening my fortune cookies? I noticed the SMAll sample container on the shelf but didn't have my camera with me. Fortunately, my buddy Aryeh Goldsmith also had a yen for Chinese, and also had his PDA phone on him. Good examples of lowercase L's come in SMAll packages!

ONlY the Lonely

CASH AND CREDIT ONlY reads the hand written sign at Register #6 of the Key Foods grocery store on 7th Ave here in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We've seen some lowercase L's that could be the result of an author running out of space while writing, forced to squeeze in a skinny "l" instead of the wasteful uppercase L with its broad right-reaching bottom. But in this example, ONlY is the ONlY word in that line of text, with ample room on the left and right to spread out. So why go with a lowercase L? God ONlY knows.

Where there's a WIll

Graffiti found in the bathroom at the Living Room music venue in Manhattan warns us, "The Revolution WIll Not Be Televised!" ... And our L's will not be capitalized! Actually I'm not sure if this is a result of a misused uppercase i, or two lowercase L's. Either way, I'm revolted.

HEZBOllAH

Sorry for the delay with delivering the goods ... First I broke my arm, and then I went to Israel for three weeks. When I got back, Dooby Harvey reported this excellent and timely lowercase L he discovered on the Little Green Footballs blog. Does VICTORY really belong to HEZBOllAH? Not with a nonsensical sign like that! How can they make a case for PEACE in the MIDDlE EAST when they can't even get the case of their L's right?

A LITTlE problem

Go ahead, try to tell me this 14th Street bakery sign in the Meat Packing District of Manhattan doesn't read "Littie Pie Company". You can't, because you see it that way, too. That lE combo in LITTlE is the same as the IE in PIE!

And how about the BlACK & White Cookies? This isn't the first time we've seen such a BlACK and white problem.

CAN'T WE "L" JUST GET AlONG?

DElIVERANCE

Coming back from a party in Astoria, Queens in the wee hours of the morn with a broken arm and a sore foot, I passed by this gem just one block from home. It was already 4:30AM and I didn't have my camera on me. Not wanting to risk the DElIVERARY person getting there in the morning before I could return, I hobbled to my 4th floor apartment and returned to the scene of the crime to get the shot.

First I'd like to say that DElIVERARY is one heck of a find! If we were working on a point system (which I should probably do to make things more interesting here), I'd award myself bonus points for finding a lowercase L directly next to an uppercase i. And some more bonus freak points for the author's inventive spelling of DELIVERY. The world lET is a decent find, too, but pales in comparison to his first deliverary device.

Then we have DElI. I'm not even sure what to make of this, both literarily and psychologically. I think there is a deli at 206a, but I'll need to go back to confirm this. Regardless, while the author seems to have become self-conscious of his lowercase L usage, he was still unable to bring himself to write an uppercase i. So instead he decided to emphasize the i-ness of his ambiguous L-i combo by using a seriffed capital i.

It is a beautiful find, and now I am more scared than ever.

God BlESS this mess

Speaking of substituting uppercase i's for L's in signage, here's an example of some pranksters who thought it would be funny to switch around the letters on a church sign, despite the lack of uppercase L's required to spell their pious message, "GOD BlESS LE TOPlESS". Personally, I believe, as I'm sure most readers of this site will agree, that the confusion caused by the two uppercase i's masquerading as L's makes this prank fall flat. Sorry, pranksters, looks like the joke's on you.