Thursday, June 29, 2006

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?

Sunday, June 18, 2006

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.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

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.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Marring MARYlAND

Submitted by Spinning Girl:
While not a hand-written sign, I just had to send you this! 8th grade students at my school had to do posters on an assigned state. Why would they make every latter capital, except for the L?!?!? Although I know that these cutout letter kits come with two L's in them, and maybe they already used them up on a poster about Illinois.

SG, if you can, try to find out if the kids did run out of uppercase L's before they could assemble MARYlAND. If they did have enough L's and simply chose to use the lowercase, we can assuredly blame the American education system.