Thursday, October 01, 2009
What’s Your Sign?
From portents, maybe I don’t so much know, but I’m certainly not about to ignore the signs. I live in a fairly active city and signage can be pretty important. It informs, entertains, educates, and sometimes even protects. I read billboards and awnings and bumpers and handbills, all the public writings my eyes encounter, indiscriminately and compulsively. Especially street signs. Those suckers can save your life.
Street signs can keep you away from bad neighborhoods, clear of cross traffic, close to bus lines and generally out of harm’s way. Sometimes they help you get where you’re going even if you aren’t sure yourself where that might be. This is the special circumstance of the philosophical street sign, of which a prime example now resides in my workplace neighborhood. Or, less obliquely:
I work near the intersection of two streets, one of which is five lanes 1-way. A familiar sign to that effect appears at each corner, encouraing cross-traffic not to turn the wrong way. You’ve seen the like before: a rectangle sharpened to a point at one end, black with a white arrow marked inside, and the arrow inscribed with black letters: “ONE WAY.” Such signs are commonplace; they’re hardly worth noticing, really, unless you’re about to turn the wrong way, of course - or if they really say something different altogether that demands a little more thought. Such as, for example, the one-way sign at Mish and Main:
Clearly this is not a one-way sign - not anymore, it isn’t. It’s an “NE WAY” sign, which I pronounce with the first two letters given their proper names and the last three combined in the traditional wordly manner. Aloud, it sounds like “ANY*WAY.”
This declaration of ambivalence is fitting because I can’t tell exactly what it’s telling me. On one hand, it could be that, regardless of the sign’s express directionality, I might feel free to go “any way” I please. All the options are open. Still, the insistence of the arrow suggests strongly that, whichever way I choose, I had better take it: I may go “any way” I wish, but go I must.
On the other hand, the sign could read as a single word - “anyway:” a word of conclusory dismissiveness. It focuses on what happens after an event; what’s important isn’t the choice but the followup. The phrase “any way” is about a decision; “anyway” is about inevitable results or conditions that ensue regardless of the predicate choice. One is a matter of the chosing, the other renders the underlying choices irrelevant as against the consequences.
I really don’t know which, if either, of these is meant by this provocative streetsign. Except, of course, that Main is still a busy five lane street with all the traffic hheading north. So long as I don’t forget to keep my eyes open for that, I can ruminate on the ambiguous philosophies of streetsigns straight on till I’m at my desk. From there, anyway, any way I’ve decided to read it, it comes out about the same.
And to continue the celebration of signage, here’s some more semi-manipulated phone photos I took at some places I’ve visited in the past few months:
I’ll have more photos for you soon. It’s fun to be using three different cameras now! Meantime, don’t you have something more productive to be doing?
