Is it Really all that Tough to Spell Correctly?

I went to play tennis with my gorgeous wife this morning. The idea was hers; on Saturday morning, my first impulse is to stay in bed; upon getting up, my first impulse is to return to bed.

We're northwest of Atlanta, and we're experiencing a heat wave this week. Thus, we decided that if we're going to do something like play tennis, we should do so before it got too hot. Joan's idea was to get up early and be on the court by nine.

We play at public courts in Cherokee County because the subdivision we live in was built before they invented tennis. When we got to the courts, I was surprised to see that all four courts were empty, despite it being 10:00 or so.

After playing for a while, I took a break to use the restroom, a little shed about ten yards from the courts, an ideal location. Both the men's and ladies' rooms had nice, freshly-printed signs on them. Both, alas, were locked. I wondered about that as I wandered off to use the restrooms by the baseball fields. After going to all that trouble to print the signs to identify the two restrooms properly, why had they been locked? Was someone concerned that they'd be misread?

It's a nice sports complex at Hobgood Park, by the way, and the park gets a good amount of use, especially on weekends. If you like to watch or play tennis, soccer or basebalol, or just enjoy hanging out in a place where lots of people are doing just that, I highly recommend it! Today, all the baseball fields were in use by the various little league teams, and the walkways were filled with kids and their parents. A nice scene.

Then I saw it. On one of the gates to the complex, designed to be seen easily from the parking lot when the gates are licked, a painted metal sign: “Field's Closed” It would have been okay if there'd been only one field, but there are three of four field's – ahem, fields – protected by that gate. I looked around and saw a couple of other examples of misused apostrophes used in plural words.

Now, I know that many people are rolling their eyes. What's the big deal? I'll tell you the big deal – these are kids, children. They're in school. They're being brought up like good Americans, to have respect for authority. They see the signs placed around the park, and they assume they're properly spelled and punctuated. And so they pick up a bad habit and perpetuate it.

My real question is this – why are these things allowed to happen? Don't the people in charge of signage in our public places know how to spell? How long would a misspelled word last on a sign erected by the public library?

For years, every time I got a communication from my daughter's school, I'd read it carefully. When we lived in New Jersey, I'd say that about half of them contained some sort of spelling or punctuation error, or worse. Here in Georgia, that percentage declined significantly, but every now and then there'd be something from the school that was, well, challenged.

Perhaps I should have contacted the schools about this, but I didn't want my daughter to get stigmatized for having a picky dad. I know that my estimation of their capabilities was affected by my realization that they cared so little for parents' sensibilities that they would send out communications that contained errors of the sort they claimed to be teaching our children to avoid.

The same thing happens in everyday life. I'd never walk into a restaurant with a misspelled sign in the window, and I've gotten up and walked out of restaurants with misspelled menu items (“bacon and egg's”). If you have so little respect for your customers that you can't be bothered to spell menu items correctly, in what other ways will that lack of respect manifest itself?

So that's today's rant – if you're going to go to the trouble of making a sign or printing a menu or sending a letter home to your students' parents, take the time to express yourself clearly and make sure you spell and punctuate your words correctly. It's one of those things that few people will notice when you do it right, but many will notice when you do it wrong.