Tuesday, March 18, 2008

If I open a cafe, I'm going to call it "Question mark ampersand"

Am I the only one who always reads "*$" as "asterisk dollar" and then has to go back and revise my interpretation when the rest of the sentence tells me someone bought a drink there?

9 comments:

  1. Anonymous2:56 PM

    "So you quote love unquote me
    Well, stranger things have come to be
    But let's agree to disagree
    Cause I don't believe you
    ....
    So you're brilliant gorgeous and
    Ampersand after ampersand
    You think I just don't understand
    But I don't believe you"

    from "I Don't Believe You" by The Magnetic Fields.
    Perhaps they should win an award for Best Use of Puctuation in a Song Lyric? :-D

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  2. I'm staying over Easter in a guesthouse called "ah!". Lower case and exclamation mark. I tend to speak it aloud as "aaaaa". But it's a tricky name.

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  3. No, you're not the only one. :)

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  4. Jana - you are right, that is a strange name for a guest house. Not least because my first instinct was to read it with the tone of someone who was unpleasantly surprised, like, "Ah! He stabbed me!"

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  5. Or like an interjection. "Ah- excuse me. There's a dead giraffe in my soup."

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  6. sometimes i have to take a second look at the sentence to understand waht "*S" means. you are not alone.

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  7. My favourite guest house name is common in Scotland - "Iona Guesthouse". I've also seen a couple of "Iona cafes".

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  8. Anonymous3:23 PM

    Sorry! For some reason I don't want to give them any greater web presence by using their real name as opposed to the abbreviation. Plus once I figured out what the abbreviation meant I just liked it!

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  9. I like it too, NK! It's clever. I just think it's funny that I am unable to read it correctly the first time around even though I see it all the time.

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