In USA popular culture sometimes there are jokes made to disparage the college graduates who devote themselves to beautiful, correct, and clear usage of English: “English majors are not employable,” for instance. And yet when the public is faced with the need for clear sentences, the spread of sloppy, ambiguous, or simply wrong English writing can be a source of amusement, annoyance, and sometimes life-crisis for decisions involving medicine, dangerous equipment, or other instructions that lead a person to a conclusion different to what the prepositions, punctuation, and dependent clauses purport to the (educated or not) readers.
This photo shows an instance of public instruction that is worthy of praise. It touches a subject that is delicate in a manner that communicates in fewest words what is important to know: what action to do, what action not to do, and the preferred solution to anything that falls outside the instructions for what to do or not to do. Compare this example to situations where context is absent, main emphasis is buried under superfluous words, or the physical facts of the writing ruins the message: text being too small, of a style that is easy to confuse between numerals and letters (1 and 0 versus lower case L and upper case “Oh”), or displaying a choice of text color that does not clearly contrast the background colors.
In the world of public transportation there are civil engineers for roads, bridges, rail systems, ports and airports who focus on “reader response” — not for published works, but instead for “user interface” — the impression of a sign message in the mind of the driver or traveler. If the colors are wrong, the size and font are unhelpful, or the choice of abbreviations and word order causes confusion, then things can go badly for the person operating the vehicle and for everyone else harmed by any sort of accident or incident begun with that initial person. For many years and sometimes still today accident studies document places along a route that are accident-prone. Based on those facts some of the existing road signs may be repositioned, speed limits may be lowered, supplementary signs may be added, or the road itself may be widened or otherwise re-engineered to give safer results.
Public information on packaging, in toilets, or on the fronts of shops seldom is studied to the same degree as the accident studies for civil engineering, but poor English usage can have big or little consequences in places other than the flow of traffic. In the much studied article from the 1940s by the USA linguistic anthropologist, Benjamin Lee Whorf, from his days as an accident insurance claims investigator, he pointed out that drums of gasoline were sometimes marked “inflammable” (an archaic form that means “capable of ignition; dangerous) and in some places would be marked “flammable.” In the 1940s it was common to see smokers indoors and outdoors. When some smokers read “in+flammable” they jumped to the conclusion that the preposition turned “flammable” into the opposite, “not flammable.” Then a stray spark ignited the gasoline vapors of the empty drum and, boom, the accident began. A more recent example comes from “flushable baby wipes.” It is true that pressing the toilet handle will make the soiled fabric disappear from one’s view, but then they sit in the plumbing of the building or along the main sewer line, sometimes reaching the waste-water processing facility intact; not dissolved or in any way disappearing. A plea from overworked public works staff is to change this misleading label on the wipes so that users will discard in the solid waste bags instead of the ruining the plumbing or sewage treatment equipment.
So let us pause for a small moment to praise the person, perhaps an English major, who composed the serviceable and concise message affixed to the door at eye-level of the toilet stall showcased here in west Michigan for the edification of the person seated with nothing much else to read.
