Tim writes:
I live in Ealing, one of the areas of west London. There’s a local shop that’ll be familiar to any city-dweller: they do dry-cleaning, shoe repair, key-making, engraving, etc. While my wife was inside picking up our dry-cleaning, I waited outside and spotted this sign they had advertising their services.
Clearly it stands for “was not”.
Perhaps they are pointing out that you really can have anything you want engraved on there, no matter how grammatically incorrect!
G’ood Gri’ef! I just stumbled onto this blog while updating my Care and Feeding of Apostrophes webpage, and I think I may have a seizure looking at some of your examples. I hope you don’t mind if I add an RSS feed to this blog!
That’s really bad!
I’m particularly fond of the lone lower case M hanging out there along the bottom.
Well…at least they got “bubbles” right…
It's actually correct grammar. It's old English for "want not."