I noticed two signs in Birmingham as I was walking to the station tonight which amused me for different reasons. The first was a large advert for Ozzy Osborne's autobiography. The title of the book is "I am Ozzy". The sign was a large picture of Ozzy with the text, reproduced exactly below, punctuated as shown.

I am Ozzy. This is his story. Read it now.

This seems to be a rather schizophrenic phrasing with the "I" in the first sentence and the "his" in the second. Had the first sentence been enclosed in quotes to make it a title, I'd have accepted it, but as it is the sense is very confused.

The second sign was a small poster in the newsagents, near the chocolate shelf. It was an advert for Terry's chocolate orange. The only problem was that the apostrophe in "Terry's" had been replaced with one of those squares that display on your computer when the font you are using doesn't include that symbol. Most likely, what has happened is that the designer has used an unusual font and when the advert has gone to its computerised print that font wasn't available and it's substituted the square. What baffles me is how it ever went to print that way. Did nobody at all notice this odd character appearing? Did they notice and not care? Did they notice and care but think, "Oh bugger, nobody will notice"?

Is the chocoate in the shape of a square? Could have been to highlight that detail.

It's a chocolate orange. It's in the shape of an... er... an orange.

Stupid me!

Is "advert" used often in England? I don't see it much here.

Interesting, Bob. I love analyzing signs like that. I agree about the schizophrenic "I" in Ozzie. Not sure about the little squares, but I'm inclined to think they didn't even notice.

My daughter saw signs all over the place in Florida saying, "Panther Crossing."

Here in the U.S. it used to be that print shops employed proofreaders to read the customers' copy for errors. The printer we used to use in the '80s for the college magazine I edited would always send the galleys to us pre-proofread for us to read. We'd make additional corrections send them back, and receive a second set of pre-proofread proofs. When desktop publishing came along, and customers were essentially setting their own type, most printers stopped helping customers with the proofreading process. You could read your proofs or not, and all they required is that you sign off on it before they printed. That ad sign was probably done by a job shop and the customer just didn't look at it before signing off. And it may have been that the customer's desktop publishing program had a font that the printer didn't!

Wordmatic

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Here in the U.S. it used to be that print shops employed proofreaders to read the customers' copy for errors.

I suspect that few organisations employ proofreaders these days. Although proofreading is not expensive, all too many believe that the cost is not justified and rely instead on the spelling and grammar checking systems in their computers.

As we all know, these systems are far from infallible - http://www.greaterthings.com/H...Spelling_Chequer.htm

I starteed out in printing doing "quality control" which involved checking that customer copy was accurate before printing and after it began the run. But over the years this work was eliminated. We had a motto in the preparation deparment: "There's never enough time to do the job right, but there's always enough time to do it over."

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I suspect that few organisations employ proofreaders these days.

We do.

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Originally posted by Kalleh:

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I suspect that few organisations employ proofreaders these days.

We do.

And I feel sure that your organisation's printed productions are the better for it.

In addition to my own checking, both manually and using the computer's system, I have all my books externally proofed three times. And I have still had errors slip through to print!