Abandon all hope of proper grammar as well

Pop quiz: Most books, blog posts, and articles start with what?

If you guessed “a capital letter”, you are very literal and correct for the purposes of this blog post.

Capitalization is one of the most obvious mistakes that you can make on a sign. It’s not as bad online because it’s a quick fix, but on a sign, it’s permanent. Here’s a quick reminder (or primer) on how to use capitalization.

• The first person pronoun “I” is always capitalized. Always. There are no exceptions.
• Capitalize the first letter of a sentence.
• Names and places are capitalized (e.g. Hunter and Lake Mills). However, directions are not capitalized unless they are a part of the name (e.g. South Beach versus northern Wisconsin).
• Proper nouns are capitalized. A proper noun refers to a specific person, place, or thing.
• In the titles of works, capitalize all important words. (e.g. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus)
• Capitalize a person’s title if it comes before the name (e.g. Senator Silly Sally). However, if the title comes after the name, don’t capitalize it (e.g. Would Silly Sally, the senator, please rise?).

Our advice? Get a second opinion and always remember that you can ignore these rules for style purposes. Many poets do, including e. e. cummings. But be careful with ignoring them if you’re trying to make a formal sign. On the other hand, if you choose the right font, you won’t have to worry about any of this. Some of our fonts only have one case and other fonts have the same size letters, meaning the only difference is the letter design. Check out our old blog posts A Rainbow of Fonts and Do Fonts Talk? for more information.

Remember, capitalization keeps your sign professional. Be careful and double-check what you want.

It's fundamental

Reading is a wonderful thing, especially if you read the entire post.

The short acronym tl;dr has become part of the internet lexicon, but it signals a significant problem. Tl;dr, which stands for “too long; didn’t read” shows the lack of care that people have for reading. This problem is especially dangerous in web commerce. One of the things that we hear is “How can we hang our signs?” And without fail, we have a link to the installation page on the item description. (You can check for yourself here.)

I realize that this isn’t the best forum for getting the message out (really, posting an article about people not reading on a blog, something that people who don’t read… won’t read), but it’s one of my pet peeves. If you have a good question about something and you can’t find the answer, then ask away. We might have overlooked something. But spend five minutes looking before asking us directly. We like your calls, but we don’t like wasting your time by forcing you to wait while we look something up.

As my kindergarten teacher said, “Ask three before me.” Look at three pages before calling or e-mailing us and you’ll find the answers to 90% of your sign questions.

Songbirds beware the feral cat

If you’re a pet lover, what do you do about ‘fixing’ your pets?

Spaying or neutering your pets is a large decision to make. We feel that spaying or neutering your pets is the best decision for you, your pets, and animal shelters. Spaying or neutering pets allows you to have a healthier pet. Fixed pets have lower rates of cancer, as well as for female pets, the elimination of becoming pregnant.

Speaking of becoming pregnant, animal shelters are already overcrowded. There are thousands, if not millions, of pets euthanized each year because a shelter cannot afford to keep them. Even with shelters, there are more than 60 million feral cats in the United States. These feral cats have reduced an already weak songbird population even more.

If you get a new pet and it hasn’t been spayed or neutered, go do it.

The "W" in Willkommen is pronounced like a "V."

Spelling is a strange topic. For one, it’s rarely constant. Over time, spellings tend to drift or change outright. Two, it’s not phonetic at all. For example, the city of Worcester, Massachusetts is pronounced “Wooster” or “Woostah”.

A standardized spelling only came into effect after the first dictionaries were published. However, even with dictionaries, spelling changed with time. Most of the changes came from simple shearing of extra letters. Catalogue became catalog, colour became color, and so on. As time went on, people began to realize that spelling in English didn’t make any sense. And thus the English Spelling Reform movements were born.

As of today, there are not very many spelling reform movements. However, during the 1800’s, there were countless proposals. By 1906, an American council had decided to seek the approval of the government for officially changing English spelling. It was largely unsuccessful because of several factors. Some of the more glaring problems, ones that still exist, are teaching people to switch to a brand new system from a well-established one, the cost of reprinting old books and signs, and the difficulty of forcing people to accept it.

However, spelling reform does make a bit of sense. After all, English words often have strange spellings and often don’t match up with their modern pronunciations. This is largely because there isn’t a single standard for English, nor is there a committee for the preservation of English, unlike French or Spanish. Without that committee, there’s no real way to unify English spellings.

Is the lack of spelling reform a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it does make learning English very complicated. Take a look at this sentence: Though a rough cough and hiccoughs ploughed through him, he houghed the horse with thorough thoughtfulness. As a native English speaker, that’s a challenging sentence, but as a second language, that’s nearly impossible. On the other hand, by not changing the spelling of words, it remains possible to suss out the meaning of obscure words, thanks to Latin and Greek roots.

Spelling is a strange thing, and Atlas Signs and Plaques will work with you, but (and there is always a but”) with that said, you have the final choice of what you want on your sign. Because of all the variables in spelling, Atlas insists on written copy from the client. If you want to make your sign Phonetic,or spelled in Old English, or would like to include Non English words, we can do that! Just let us know and we’ll do the rest.

Nasa Photo

Hiding in the shadows, a sinister plot builds and grows…

There’s nothing quite like a good conspiracy, is there? The lovely interplay of thousands of parts, all spinning together, toward a sinister end. It’s actually somewhat comforting to think that there is a pattern is all the randomness of the world. After all, humans see patterns instinctively. In fact, seeing patterns was probably a survival trait on the African savannah and in prehistory. If someone could see the shape of a tiger or lion lurking in the tall grass, they would have a better chance of surviving into adulthood and reproduction.

However, conspiracies are persistent. For example, there is a small but dedicated group that insists on doubting that the Moon landings ever happened. They believe that they were faked on a Hollywood backlot or a studio or a desert out West. While on the surface some of these claims seem plausible, there’s one rather large problem. How has NASA and the US Government managed to suppress all of the information and pictures that would show that the landings were faked? Basically, my counterargument to this conspiracy is that it presupposes a level of competency that doesn’t quite match up properly. In addition, more than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo Project and none of them has come out to support this theory.

This is my main issue with the conspiracy of a Global Order that secretly runs everything. If they are powerful enough to run the entire world, why not just step out and rule directly? And two, how has no one in the organization stepped out? Occam’s Razor is a nifty little tool that cuts right to the heart of conspiracies: the simplest solution is usually the best.

Admittedly, there have been some conspiracies that were true. The 1953 Iranian coup d’etat was run by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States. There really was a US government program dedicated to studying drugs, called MKUltra.  But those generally much more limited in scale and are incredibly rare. In general, apply Occam’s Razor and a splash of logic and you’ll do alright.