February 6, 2001
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I remember back when I was twelve or so, I was hanging out along the shore of the lake where my family had a cabin. It was spring, and there were piles of wood and other soggy bits of flotsam lining the waters edge. One particular item grabbed my attention through all the tattered tree limbs and random lengths of weather-beaten lumber. It was a hand-painted wooden sign that clearly read, in large sans serif characters, “not ice”. I immediately pondered why anyone would have a sign by a lake that told the observer, in no uncertain terms, that something was not ice. Of course it’s not ice, I thought, it’s water… After several minutes, the rest of my vacationing synapses fired in unison, and I read the sign as it was intended. Notice.
The point of this story was to give me a reasonable excuse to mention that a similar scenario played out again this week. As I was driving to work, a billboard headline crossed my field of vision. The ad on the billboard wasn’t so attractive as to garner much more than half my attention, but nevertheless I glanced at it long enough to read, quite plainly, “ear ned”. What a strange thing to put on a billboard, I said to myself, only partially paying attention to the voice inside my head. I drove three more blocks before the little person that lives inside my skull stomped on enough nerve endings to relay the original message of the sign. Earned.As best as I can tell, I’m cursed with a mild case of sporadic divisive syllable syndrome — a reasonably close kissing cousin to spoonerism. Ear ned, indeed.
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