Weird Signs and Strange Sights

It is difficult and embarrassing to make a correction when you publish a mistake in a newspaper. But, at least, errors in print are not written in stone.

So, what do you do when a monument includes a misspelled word?

For example, a neat plaque tastefully positioned under one of the trees along the sidewalk at the King Street entrance to the Snyder Hall reads:

IN LOVING MEMORY
PAUL M. SAAB
FOREVER GREATFUL
THE SISTERS OF SIGMA SIGMA SIGMA SORORITY
&
THE BROTHERS OF THETA XI FRATERNITY
APRIL 22, 2002

It is wonderful that the students remembered their professor so fondly. It would have been even better if they had remembered how to spell “grateful.”

As I gaze at this sign, I cannot help shuddering in dread that it will catch the eye of a visiting dignitary with an ingrained obsession for engraved glitches. I further imagine that shocked observer as being the presiding member of an evaluating committee from some big accrediting organization. Uh-oh….

Let’s assume the misspelling connotes reverence for a “great-hearted” and magnanimous individual who deserves to be remembered with full honor.

I suppose that I should take a deep breath and forget-about-it.

Does anyone but an English teacher worry about such trivia? Yet, typos, especially typos engraved for posterity, stick in my mind: I cannot help it.

Another pet-peeve I’ve been unable to forget involves the strange structure between Snyder Hall and Knutti Hall, where I teach most of my classes.
I refer to the anonymous orange-yellow storage-shack (or whatever it is) that stands along High Street, blocking the view of the green-houses connected to the Institute for Environmental Studies Renewable Energy Site.

When I step out of Knutti Hall, there it is, in all its enigmatic shabbiness.

But what is it, anyway?

The yellowish paint curling on the wood sidewalls appears to have been peeling since the Vietnam War. The building itself looks like a relic from the era preceding the War Between the States, as old as West Virginia.

One of the upper-windows is broken, and shards of glass lie scattered on the ground. Peering into the clouded window panes beside the locked front door, all I can see is a clutter even worse than the one on my desk.

You may have noticed the spanking fresh billboard-maps that have popped up recently to helpfully identify everything from parking places to the new buildings on West Campus to that pedagogical landmark, the “Little House,” which has an arrow and a dot, identified on the side panel as Number 12, between White Hall, Number 23, and Human Resources, Number 8.

(If there is a mystical meaning to the numbering system, I do not know it.)

But the guide-maps do not identify the broken-down painted wood structure. It has no name, nor number, nor any identifiable reason for its existence.

Some years ago, as I recall, there were plans to remodel the old joint as a lounge for students and professors, to drink coffee and share perspectives outside of a classroom. Now that we have the Bistro in the Rams Den, an alternative meeting place seems less necessary than it probably used to be.

But what was the building intended for in the first place? And how will it fit into campus beautification? One of these days, it may be deconstructed.

It could be all-but-erased from the collective memory of our campus.

Between my office and the faculty parking lot behind the library, within a radius of less than one square block, this shack is one of a variety of intriguing signs and puzzling sights. I enjoy the changing landscape.

Still, the letters identifying the Robert c. Byrd Science building shall endure, undaunted, chiseled in concrete with the lower-case middle initial intact!

Correcting THAT typo would take more effort than I would care to consider. All I offer, in consolation, is one of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets:

“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power….”

Eternity evidently lasts longer than any of us would wish to remember.