Too Many Signs
There are too many signs. Signs of every kind. Signs with names, signs with numbers, signs with instructions or warnings, signs with words, words and more words. The whole landscape littered with signs upon signs. You can’t drive down a street, certainly not one in a business district, and definitely not on a highway, without being assaulted by the excess of words on too many goddamn signs.
“Why,” you might ask, “is this a problem? Isn’t it a good thing we have signs?” you demand. “Shouldn’t there be, if anything, more signs? Don’t you love the written word?” you screech. “Shouldn’t there be words covering every goddamn thing in existence?” you bleat incessantly at the top of your lungs.
Yes, I love words, appreciate the importance of signs in many instances, and value the concept of language as perhaps humankind’s greatest invention, ranking way up there with soap and many miles ahead of sliced bread.
The problem is not with signs and words on a fundamental level; it is a problem of excess, a problem of both safety and aesthetics.
If you are anything like me, dear reader, you are obsessed, perhaps pathologically, with words and language. If you’re like me, you cannot help but read everything that you see. If you and the written/printed material in question maintain close proximity, you will read it again, and again and again, the words repeating ad nauseum in your head. Then your mind will begin playing with the words. Maybe you’ll create anagrams, or add and subtract letters to make new words. If the sign’s words compose a long phrase, your brain will reorder the words in the phrase, whether to make it more grammatically correct, its meaning more clear and direct, or more amusing. If these principles demand it, prepositions and other words will be mentally added.
For example, the sign stating, WATCH CHILDREN, demands the addition of a FOR and
preferably an OUT before that. Signs saying, WATCH OUT FOR CHILDREN do exist, but the declarative, and possibly interpretable as instructions to, or condoning the sick actions of, stalkers and pedophiles, WATCH CHILDREN on bright yellow diamond signs is far more common in my experience.
But more than safety signs of broken English, what rankles my turkey are all the other signs of many words and narrow interest. Like signs in windows of restaurants I’ll never go to detailing some meal deal of which I’ll never partake, signs announcing events at schools and community centers which hold no importance for me personally and are therefore worthless, and, for the sake of fuck, signs advertising a politician; seeing your name incorporated into some variation of a red, white, and blue background will not make me or anyone more inclined to vote for you (it only risks inclining me towards vandalizing private property).
This being a capitalist cesspool in which we all languish, however, the vast majority of signs are commercial advertisements. Virtually all of these are an affront to good taste and the senses. A ceaseless barrage of attempts at enticement for every product and service conceivable. Most are dull and banal, which is its own crime, but worse are those that attempt cleverness, or worse still, coolness. No gag or slogan, no matter how desperately marketers attempt wit, will ever be legitimately funny and persuade anyone to enlist a specific insurance company. There’s nothing funny about car insurance. It’s an extortion scam, and you’re going to get the cheapest required, not the one with the more amusing and/or fuckable mascot. And McDonald’s will never be cool. Not ever. Never will McDonald’s ever be anything but a death merchant conning the poor and the ignorant into poisoning themselves with tasty chemicals.
But the safety issue. The problem, for people like me and maybe you, dear reader, who read and reread and play with sentence structure and create new anagrammed words and phrases with the source material of the signs, is one of distraction. Whenever I drive past a sign, and am compelled to read it, those are seconds during which my attention is divided. My eyes are off the road. My distracted mind is repeating SHARE ROAD and reversing its order and lamenting the lack of a THE, pondering the etymology of real estate agents’ surnames, turning K Arrot Terminal into Kakarot Terminate, struggling for the “correct” pronunciations for “Banana Split” and “Dairy Queen” when read backwards. These compulsive word games may well lead to the injury and/or death of myself and countless others, and when this inevitably happens, it will be the signs that are to blame.