It’s My Job To Make Sure The English On Your Sign Is Wrong

By Iver Mikhshol, Municipal Sign Approval Commission

No storefront business is complete without an attractive sign out front. And no such business will open in this town unless it contains at least one glaring error in English. Guaranteed!

Municipal law requires all businesses to get approval for any sign they want to put up. And my job involves making sure that signs containing English words display them in an embarrassingly wrong fashion. It’s the city government’s little contribution to making everyone realize that despite the advances of the last few decades, they’re still in the third-world Middle East, not some posh Upper East Side town house.

It doesn’t have to be spelling mistakes, but that’s by far the easiest kind to come by. You have a nail salon, and for some reason you think it’s “hip” to have the name displayed in English? No problem, provided you spell it Nale. You’re a hairdresser and you want to showcase your skill? Better call what you do “hairstayling.” It’s important for anyone with a passable command of English to know that someone was obviously trying to transliterate from the unvowelized Hebrew, and that the someone doing so had at best a kindergarten-level grasp of English phonics.

Want to invoke a Hollywood classic in the name of your fashion boutique? We’ll make sure it’s called Preety Woman. Anything to highlight the fact that modern Hebrew has no equivalent for the short “I” vowel sound, so any such meestake weel grab attention. Those vowels can provide so much entertainment. They might be implied by context in Hebrew, but in English, boy will you look stupid if you leave them out! And that’s my job. We had a restaurant called Hashloshah with a sign that read HSHLSHH. I love what I do.

Our department is also in charge of street signs. Spelling something wrong is one thing, but where there are multiple ways of spelling the same name, you can bet we’ll use all of them, often on two different signs at the same intersection. We don’t care whether the “K” sound is made with a K or a C – either one will do! Especially if the next vowel is i or e, throwing the reader’s comprehension into utter disarray. I live for that.

Someone suggested that there be some sort of orthography for this – that, for example, the name Carlebach be spelled the same way everywhere across the country. But that would mean we couldn’t confuse tourists and new immigrants by spelling it without the E, or with a K instead of a C – what kind of insensitive monster would propose such a thing? What would they have us do, play it straight? If there’s anything this part of the world excels at, it’s schadenfreude; nobody better take THAT away.

You get all kinds of fun with the different phonetic systems. Once upon a time the standard was German – so all “tz” sounds were represented by the letter Z, and “v” sounds by W. We still have comical vestiges of that in certain place names, such as highway signs that read, “Petah Tiqwa” – you ask any Israeli where “Petah Tiqwa” is and they’ll back away from you, maybe call the police. If our work doesn’t prompt at least one incident every week, we don’t feel like we’re doing our job.

Sometimes even in Hebrew the spelling or pronunciation is unclear, especially when it comes to names. You’d think we Israelis would have a pretty good grasp on how to vowelize the name of none other than Theodor Herzl, but nope. The rules of Hebrew grammar don’t allow a schwa between the last two consonants – so we get to mangle the name of the founder of the Zionist movement. It’s fitting that the end of the line on the light rail is right near his burial place, and the signs there spell the name three different ways. Probably exactly what he envisioned.

Now if you’ll excuse me, someone is applying for a sign that says ESS. Better replace that E with an A…

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