BRITISH SIGNS

From Newscientist.com

AS DOCTORS know only too well, as soon as you give a syndrome a name it starts popping up all over the place. So at the end of last year, when we coined the term semiopathy – the phenomenon of reading inappropriate emotions into signs – dozens of readers discovered that they were semiopathologists. And, in the best academic tradition, it's time to create some sub-disciplines.

First come the "time-flies" signs, named after the grammar-wrenching line from Groucho Marx: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Thus, is the sign "Crocodiles Do Not Swim Here" at the Jinja Sailing Club in Zimbabwe an announcement that they've decided to walk, or an injunction to literate crocodilians? And unfortunately for keen young lads, it seems unlikely that the sign outside the Sports Club in Bombay, India, reading "First hump 116 yards ahead" refers to a much-anticipated experience.

Advertisers seem particularly keen on getting the wrong message across. What proud parent would want to buy Boots' "Extra Thick Baby Wipes" for their little Einstein? And who would stop at the farm near Edinburgh announcing "Burning logs and peat for sale", unless they were really fed up with their car interior? And Janis Cortese was tickled by a spam e-mail promising that she could "attract men with larger breasts". However, she tells us she would generally prefer to attract men who have no discernible breasts of any kind.

A subspecies of time-flies inhabits the world of instructions and warnings. Thus Paul Dear has never dared comply with the plaintive request from his computer printer: "Input Jam".

Regulations tend to evolve toward greater complexity, George Daughters hypothesises, after seeing the street sign "No trucks allowed" metamorphose into "No trucks between 6 am and 7 pm eastbound on Route 16 on Tuesdays over 8 tons". He claims never to have seen a Tuesday that was an ounce over 2 tons.

Only an Australian Department of Posthumous Jurisprudence could be responsible for the sign at a railway crossing in Melbourne: "Warning! Touching overhead wires causes instant death!...Penalty $200." And outside the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency establishment at Fort Halstead in Kent you are, apparently, warned that "Police Club Visitors". Best not go there, then.

Our second sub-discipline is what we'll call "domain-specific semiopathy". While the time-flies inhabit language in general, this specifically infests jargon. For example, it will be cosmologists, mostly, who will be tickled by the sign in the car park by the Co-op store in Wadebridge, Cornwall, saying "Please wait for space to appear". Neurologists, meanwhile, may not be terribly optimistic that they'll reach their destination if they get into a cab displaying the company name "ATAXIS" on the roof. And it took a zoologist to be baffled by the advertisement in this magazine some time ago for a "small ruminant scientist".

Psychiatrists, on the other hand, may feel empathy with the "baffled fermenters" that Margaret Clotworthy keeps hearing about in lectures on industrial bioprocessing. And they'll certainly avoid depending too much on the product in the truck with the big revolving drum that Peter Milner followed through Auckland: "Certified Concrete".

Someone has probably tried to avoid psychiatric-semiopathic tendencies in the warning on the lids of jars of sauce: "Reject if the safety button can be depressed". Note the "can be". Several cruel readers, however, persist in trying, telling it that it has no friends and no hope, before taking it home anyway.

Our last sub-discipline will, by nature, be the hardest in which to produce statistically significant studies. Serendipitous semiopathy is notoriously dependent on happenstance – as when a few months ago Richard Proctor saw a sign reading "Police Accident" and drove carefully round the corner, to find a police car in the hedge.

THE ACADEMIC PRESS is proud to announce the publication of the sixth edition of Table of Integrals, Series, and Products by I. S. Gradshteyn, I. M. Ryzhik, Alan Jeffrey and Daniel Zwillinger. According to the promotional blurb, "This sixth edition includes hundreds of corrections to the previous edition."

After five previous tries, we wonder if this will enhance or diminish readers' confidence.

SPARE a thought for 16-year-old Hereford schoolboy Christian King. He was travelling on a train with his school technology project, an electronic foot pedal for a guitar, but accidentally left the device behind when he got off. When the ever-vigilant police found the package a major security alert followed, with the busy New Street station in Birmingham being evacuated for several hours in case the device was a bomb.

The police have accepted King's apologies for his mistake, but unfortunately his problems are not yet over. According to the BBC Online news report of the incident: "His teachers are now consulting the examination board on how to grade the project since its destruction in a controlled explosion."

THE FLYER for Perrymen's 100 per cent pure blood and bone, on sale in gardening shops in Melbourne, proudly states: "The product contains no chemicals". Directly beneath this it lists what it does contain: "Nitrogen 8.00 per cent, Phosphate 4.70 per cent, Sulphur 0.48 per cent, Calcium 10.10 per cent, Manganese 37 ppm, Magnesium 0.20 per cent, Copper 4 ppm, Zinc 130 ppm, Iron 600 ppm, Boron 15 ppm, Sodium 0.44 per cent, Chloride 0.32 per cent."

FINALLY, on easycar's website the following note is given in the details about the opening time of the Glasgow branch: "easyRentacar regrets that it cannot remain open outside the published opening hours in the event of any delays or failures in the mode of transport used to reach the rental location . . . "

Just above this note, the page states: "Hours of opening 00:01 - 23:59".