A Massachusetts middle school paints "SHCOOL" on their road

Originally published at: A Massachusetts middle school paints "SHCOOL" on their road | Boing Boing

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Wow, amazing to see a road marking typo that’s actually real. All the memes and stuff that go around on this are pretty much all fake.

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There’s an old sign-painter’s maxim : “The larger the letters, the higher the likelihood that you’ll misspell what you’re writing.”

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I’m pretty sure this is where “Great Googily-Moogily” entered the public lexicon (such as it is).

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“Sh’Cool” is my new rapper name.

(Just don’t ask me to rap. Nobody wants that.)

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I’d think this is actually pretty good for safety. People are more likely to notice (and remember) the warning because it is surprising. (Whether or not they’ll actually listen to it is another story.)

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Well, they got “slow” right (in more ways than one.)

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Nah, that’s what you yell when you pounce on the fur-trapper who has hit your favorite baby seal.

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It’s definitely where it entered my lexicon!

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Indeed

Aye Kun spel reel gud; huked ahn fonix werks fer meh. :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

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… of course “whole language” and “phonics” are actually opposing teams in a pedagogical culture war going back decades :thinking:

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This is true but only because the human mind has already learnt to read proper spelling.

However I would love to feed tons of that word hash into ChatGPT

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44f8398ff2b1f2f3edacf60a41fe5416--quotations-spelling

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Plenty of real ones, sadly. Transposing the “c” and “h” in “school” seems to be the most common typo, though “stop” is also misspelled more often than you’d think.

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MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM by Dolton Edwards

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First, don’t blame the school, they don’t paint road markings themselves. It would be the city street department.

But mainly I came here because seeing this immediately made me think of a pattern I’ve come to notice in recent years. It’s prevalent in a few news readers to pronounce “shtreet” and “shtrong” and such. So “shcool” feels similar.

It feels like either drunken slurs or a speech impediment. But places I’ve heard it (NPR for instance) totally contradict that idea. It’s also kind of like a Sean Connery or a Humphrey Bogart affectation. (“Here’s looking at you, shweetheart.”) [Edit: It’s “kid”, not “sweetheart” in that line from Casablanca. Oh well, he did say it in other quotes. I think. At least enough that error didn’t jump out to me when I read it in a discussion.]

If you search this pattern, you’ll find a very deep rabbit hole of linguistic discussion. It leads to lots of similar examples in lots of regions, cultures, and eras.

It has seemed recently to have emerged among younger speaker vs boomers like myself.

So maybe the painter was making a generational shtatement? :grinning:

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He’s too cool for school. :sunglasses:

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