NO PlATES

Matt spotted this exceptional lowercase L on a trash bin at Papa Chito's mexican restaurant in San Diego. There are absolutely no other lowercase letters in the sign, which reads "PLEASE!! NO PlATES IN THE TRASH", making this a prime specimen. And there really was ample room to spell PLATES with an uppercase L. One might argue that the author was trying to keep every line of text centered, and realized this would not be possible unless the lower rung of the L was omitted. So the sacrifice was made ... but at what price?

Scary as HEll

Yes, indeed, November 4th was not HAllOWEEN, a celebration which actually took place four days earlier. I'm guessing the author got scared and panicked upon realizing there would be no space to write his message, hence the space-saving lowercase L's next to a dotted uppercase i in WIll, u for YOU, and miniaturizing and stacking words at the end of the sentence. I can't help but agree with this sign that Ash found ... our future WIll BE SCARY AS HEll if we, as a people, do not change. And by change, I mean properly change case from lower to upper when using L and i.

Incidentally, I did vote.

PlEASE VOTE!

This has nothing to do with lowercase L — it's a cartoon I made to remind people to vote tomorrow on Election Day. If you live here in the United States, PlEASE VOTE!

Calling the kettie black

This is an information card taken from my room at the Dan Panorama Hotel in Eilat, Israel. Notice the English translation requests:

You are kindly requested not to use electrical appliances such as irons, ketties, etc. in your room.

So what is a ketty, or ketties? Well, in the Hebrew version above, it corresponds with the word קומקום

which translates to KETTLES. So I'm guessing when someone was translating the Hebrew into English, they used a lowercase L when writing KETTlES, and this was reasonably mistaken for an uppercase i by the non-English speaking printer. By the way, this is not the first time someone has made the grave error of substituting a handwritten lowercase L for a printed uppercase i.

I'll DEBATE

Christian C. found this report for the 2008 presidential debate on the front page of the Huffington Post today. It's not confusing to read, but certainly an interesting editorial choice to only make the L's lowercase in "I'll", while all the other letters in the headline, including the typically lowercase first "c" in McCain, are uppercase. They may have been trying to save some space, considering there is no space between the ellipsis and BRING UP.

The ENVElOPES, please

I snapped this photo in the storage closet of one of my clients. Whoever wrote this was not unfamiliar with LARGE L's, but oddly chose not to stuff one into ENVElOPES.

MlS-leading

My brother-in-law Todd got in on the lowercase L action when he found this MlS-leading Multiple Listing Service website. Webmaster Alex Zapata got it right in the first MLS heading, and all the other MLS mentions throughout. But the L in the final "Find your desired property through the MlS" is just bad placement, and we all know the three most important things in real estate, right? lOCATION, lOCATION, and lOCATION.

ART FOlDER

The Joshmeister found this lowercase L in Southern California. The celestial misalignment of stars that formed this art constellation seems to be the cause of the improperly used lowercase L on the ART FOlDER.

BlOODS

"lIl Wayne" spotted this graffiti on a public television news broadcast, WYIN in northwest Indiana, and muses that the BlOODS gang doesn't seem nearly as menacing when written this way. I'm sure the Crips will have a field day with this one.

lowercase AlEX

Local New Yorker Jeff discovered this concrete evidence of lowercase L corruption here in the city:

I have passed this many times on my way to and from work and finally stopped to take a picture. I found it on Vesey street, down by the WTC site. Apparently AlEX + SHARON wanted to profess their love to the world in a permanent way. I apologize for the blurriness.

Even if Alex discovered his mistake just an hour later it would have been too late to correct. His carelessness is forever on display, permanently set in stone. This may just be the saddest thing that has ever happened in the site of the former World Trade Center.