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Several years ago, I made an observation.
Rest assured I’ve made observations since then, and continue to make them on the regular.
A collection of bold, red, capital letters resides just above the doors of an inconvenience store which shares my zip code:
Now why in tarnation would the proprietors of such an upstanding establishment go slipshod with their signage?
After all, the doors and windows are littered with advertisements for the current lottery payouts, enticements for tobacco products, and the going rate for the roller grill-born hot dogs designed to render your lower gastrointestinal system a pile of mushy goo.
There could be a dozen reasons why the proprietors would display such a mind-boggling message.
Maybe they were running low on smaller font.
Maybe the B’s, K’s, O’s and sometimes Y’s were deemed non-essential.
It’s not like WE THANUSINESS has been the only culprit.
Just yesterday, another one caught my eye on the side of a completely different convenience store.
R YOUR BK YOU FO was plastered on the side of the building. I’m sure if I had the right pair of glasses, the coded message underneath would have provided a detailed inventory of their bubble gum.
Maybe the signs are part of an elaborate scheme to abscond with millions (if not billions) in government grants designed to subsidize the junk food needs of the impoverished middle class on the northwest side of town.
Sure Minneapolis found a worthwhile cause by opening up Learing Centers with their ill-gotten gains. San Antonio convenience stores are still flying under the radar because government grants to such establishments just don’t make sense.
Maybe there was a bad connection when the sign was ordered from the printer and the parties on either end of the line were just sounding things out in the best and broken ‘Murcanized Englitch they could muster.
Sound it out.
That’s how I learned to read.
That’s how everyone learns to read, however in my case it was part of a program using a whole different alphabet.
For the small percentage of you Gen Xers out there that were part of this well-meaning literacy experiment, I’m going to trigger a flashback with the utterance of three simple letters.
ITA.
The Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA) is a modified Latin alphabet developed by Sir James Pitman. The entire system is built on breaking English into something much easier to learn by using phonetics over traditional spelling.
In essence, the fundamentals were redesigned with the promise of a better understanding.
Just like Common Core math.
Anyone introduced to either of these teaching methods who had not seen it before would get the impression they were reading a customer appreciation banner over the door of a convenience store.
In any event, ITA went away sometime in the 70’s. Regarding Common Core, my best understanding is that it’s come back with a different shade of lipstick.
Under the assumption that you didn’t come here to ensconce yourself in verbally brilliant insights about teaching fads of the last fifty years, let’s get back to the banner.
Ladies and gentlemen, some of these banners have been up for years. In all that time, someone has bound to have slapped down a couple bucks for whatever that slurry is in the fountain and then made a comment about how the sign over the door has a naughty word in it.
Mistakes were made.
Fine.
Why not fix it?
Why leave it up?
I put in a call to Sir James Pitman about the matter, however the call went unanswered. It seems he passed over forty years ago. Strangely enough, his gravestone lacks the challenging letters which littered my life when I was learning about literacy.
Alliteration almost always annoys.
Even still, I’ve got to think that Jim (I don’t think he’ll mind me calling him that at this point) would be okay with the banner. The meaning has been conveyed, even though the organization of the statement was compiled by a subset of monkeys in a room with typewriters charged with compiling the works of Shakespeare.
