With today’s focus on concise writing (and text messages and tweets, which force us to abbreviations and emoticons), our US road signs continue to have a prolix style.
Take a look at this sign in East Sandwich (beach):
Just across the street, another sign: beach sticker and parking times and dog details. In contrast, a sign at a port on the Cap d'Antibes conveys a significant amount of information.
Although Europe has been using pictograms since the late 1960s, and the US talked about it, our signs continue to carry too much information.
One writer for Slate pointed out that most road users are English speakers. But 62-million tourists visited the US in 2011, according to the Department of Commerce. In South Florida, the main language seems to be Spanish.
Are these signs with TMI more costly? Do they lead to more accidents as drivers crane their heads to read as they whizz by?
Or do people actually read these signs? An article in a Cape Cod publication said no one noticed a misspelled road sign (Masphee instead of Mashpee).
But maybe the argument about TMI would get you out of a parking ticket. Has anyone tried?
Life is too fast-paced already. Why add to the flurry by transforming signs into digestible eye-bites? Sometimes I just like to stand in the parking lot for a long time, reading all the signs. I plan to work them into the intricate plot of my in-progress romance novel.
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That's the only good use for those signs. Maybe a linguist meets a foreigner in your novel.
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