Tuesday, July 31, 2007

maybe it's a "queue"


Writes submitter Peter: "Originally this was just a picture of a horribly drawn arrow at a store I visited in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was only upon further inspection that I "realized" that we had only been standing in a "line." I also like the how "ENd" was a) written with a combination
of upper and lower case letters, and b) underlined twice for no apparent reason."

Perhaps this store has a history of people standing in a jumble, rather than an orderly line (or queue). Incidentally, I love the word queue. It's the only word in the english language where the only consonant is Q.

6 comments:

Chris Bennett said...

what I want to know is, why does the arrow look kind of like a squid?

Anonymous said...

It makes me wonder what REALLY starts at the other "end".

PS. I always seem to get the letter q in my word verification.

Anonymous said...

That's an awfully phallic arrow. Also the first thing I would have noticed.

No q in my verification. It's layhrwr. seems to fit with my theme today

Unknown said...

I'm curious about the "rocket blast" lines being emitted by the arrow. Were they supposed to be fletches?

I'm also trying to decipher when and how the arrow-drawer created the drawing. It looks like the words on the sign went first, and then an arrow was intended to be added to convey helpful direction. I'm guessing the drawer started with the horizontal lines of the shaft, began adding the upper slope of the arrow tip, realized the initial angle of descent would run into the words, and so truncated it into the rounded squid head. The result probably did not look much like a useful arrow, a problem not remedied by the addition of lines joining the tip to the shaft. So, maybe the tail lines are not fletches, but are supposed to convey movement in the direction indicated.

I come to the conclusion, therefore, that the arrow-drawer is actually an intuitive genius of communication.

J. Kelly said...

What about aqua? Or quo, as in status quo?

Anonymous said...

I can think of numerous words in the English language with a single consonant. Cue, id and ego are the first to come to mind.