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What are you trying to say?
Words by Matthew Sweet
Across small-town America, slapdash sign-writing has become an artform - in these photographs by Sonja Campbell, at least. Matthew Sweet wonders if he's getting the message.
We're used to small scale outbreaks of textual weirdness: the traditional greengrocer's apostrophe, the Austrian restaurant menu I once saw that offered a frustuck of "roasted cum-filled dong bags", the "gentleman's shit" of which a hopeful advertiser attempted to rid himself through the Under A Tenner column of the Manchester Evening News.
But the freeway signs photographed by Sonja Campbell, with their curled letters blazing from roadside light boxes, are rather more conspicuous. And in a contemporary America where the motels, strip joints and Episcopalian chapels form a series of featureless concrete boxes squatting on the outskirts of every town, such eccentricities are often the only way of distinguishing one settlement from another.
Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy couldn't have got all their Route 66 kicks by smoking dope and banging about how complicated they were.
Fixed in place by the owners of small businesses and institutions, these block-lettered exhortations to passing motorists are unregulated by any corporate phrase-making or the literacy of professional sign-writers.
Some as are opaque as coded telegrams, or give details of services too peculiar for any self-respecting poster-printer to countenance. Others appear to have been slapped down as thoughtlessly as a set of alphabet fridge magnets, or - like the words above the door of Sunshine Desserts - have been lent a sense of bathos by damage or neglect.
Most measure out that distance that often exists between what people mean and what they write - especially when they are forced to express themselves in stern plastic letters, and have used up all the E's in the bucket.
And they only exist, perhaps, because the places in which they appear are so interstitial and unregarded. Who would bother to stop and question their logic and spelling, or inquire about the strange worlds whose presence they suggest, just beyond the next turn-off?
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