Mangaluru: Ramanath RaiForest! Oops-When Sign-Maker Goofs Up, Minister gets a New ‘Surname’

Mangaluru: Ramanath RaiForest-that’s right! I bet State minister Ramanath Rai is probably not aware that he has got a new surname specially given by a sign-maker, who has painted some of the hoardings/banners pertaining to the 19th Federation Athletic Championships 2015. Even the name of a couple of bank sponsors have been spelled wrong, like Syndicte, instead of Syndicate; and Karnatka, instead of Karnataka. Okay, the poor guy made some errors while painting, but isn’t it the job of the person or persons who are assigned to look into publicity to check that everything was spelled and done right, since it was a big national event. Guess they too failed in spell check!

Although the British had ruled this country for so long years, English has not much improved among the citizens of India. The English language can become quite tricky when it comes to speaking and writing. Today, most people go with the sound of phonetics when they want to write something down. If you decide to take a stroll down your street today, you might come across a sign board or a hoarding which has a spelling error. It is only human tendency that when we look at something so hilarious like this we burst into laughter and thus make a mockery out of it by sharing a picture of these hilarious spelling mistakes signboards in your circle of friends. But can you imagine the state of the person who has written that so called ‘error free’ sentence on the signboard you have spotted. It becomes a sad state of affair when you think of it rationally.

The reason being that these people who imprint the lettering on these signboards have no idea what trouble they are getting themselves into! The only reason for this mistake is that the English language is not a 100% phonetic and also because there are so many exceptions when it comes to a certain spelling in the English language. The English spellings can be tricky at times, even for English speaking people! Sometimes, these hilarious spelling mistakes will make you burst and cry into laughter. Although our website photographer spotted only a few signs with errors, there could be many more errors on all the hoardings/banners and other publicity materials hung or displayed elsewhere in the city. English Vinglish!

Yes, there are a lot of bad spellers out there. There are many conclusions that could be drawn about people with poor spelling and grammar:  that they’re careless; that they’re lazy;  that they  over smart etc, etc. Would you consider some or any of those conclusions to be legitimate and non-trivial? I’m honestly curious, because this topic is such a point of contention around the interwebs. I’d say that people who are making signs may not be in the most calm frame of mind, which could also lead to spelling mistakes they might not otherwise make. I guess this is related to ‘careless’ in keep-it-under-cover’s comment, but I think looking at it from that mindset could explain some of the errors.

Going around the city I have seen quite a few places where the signs are spelled wrong, and even if you tell them about the spelling errors, the shop owners simply ignore you and leave the signs as they are – like a sign at a juice/snack shop spelled “Painapple Juice” for “Pineapple”; ‘Hot Snakes” for “Hot Snacks”; “Pomogrenade Juice” for “Pomegranate juice”; other day an auto-rickshaw had this sign on front-“Lady of Perpetual Sucker”-should have been “Lady of Perpetual Succour” (This sign makes a big insult and mockery of the Blessed Mary); and many others.

Misspellings on signs just point to a lack of centralized leadership or organization more than anything else. Everyone makes mistakes when they are creating big signs, and there’s no way to fix it usually. So the mistakes only get caught if there is someone else around who has the desire and power to correct the mistake. Just this morning I learnt that after we had pointed out the errors on the hoarding to the committee members, the errors have been fixed – but the persons who are in charge of the publicity should have seen it before the hoarding was put up. Okay, the sign-maker made a mistake, it was the job of the publicity department to check everything was okay. I don’t blame the sign-maker, but I blame the members of publicity committee for their carelessness. But anyways, I guess, it’s like the saying “No use crying over spilled milk!”