Along my usual way to work, a sign popped up one day. “Kellytown Cementary,” it proclaimed, with an arrow pointing toward a small dirt trail that fed between two overgrown hedgerows. Obviously, the sign should have read “Kellytown Cemetery”, but if it did, I wouldn’t have had the solid five minutes of speculative enjoyment. Actually, when you think of it, “cementary” is really rather correct. When you go there, you just see the cement and marble markers in a field. I left for work a few minutes earlier the next day in order to be able to snap a picture, but alas, the sign had already been corrected at that point.
Speaking of roadsigns, I saw a really cool “slideshow” (as they want to cal them) at the New York Times of the changes being made in the fonts used in all of the highway and freeway signs. It was interesting to see how theywent about field-testing he readability of the new signs with a mostly retired-age sample group, and took into account the effects of the new higher-intensity roadsign materials and higher-intensity car headlights, too. Slick stuff!
If you are a collector of fonts, you should peek in Over Here to get copies of the fonts (and windings!) currently being used in roadsigns in different countries.
And as far as cemeteries, I’m sort of torn between them being a wonderful gesture, memorializing your family, providing basic genealogy information to future generations, etc, but on the other hand, there’s the real estate used, and how you see a little, very old cemetery found here and there in development projects, and they put a little fence around them, and just keep building around it… it’s like the space is respected, but not by much….