Saturday, August 01, 2009

All shipments cannot contain no

I just found this note from two weeks ago, but it's timeless. I bought presents in Washington and UPSd them home to avoid the extra baggage charge for a second suitcase. The UPS store had a notice in it, of academic interest as I was shipping to Tennessee:
All Shipments to Mexico Cannot Contain the Following:
  • No products made in China
  • No shoes of any kind
  • All clothing must be NEW and with tags included
Pragmatically, I understand what they mean, but syntactically? This sign's a mess. Particularly bad is the instruction that all packages to Mexico must contain shoes and something from China (nowadays, most shoes are from China, so that's easy), but also problematic is the third bullet - there's a reason bullets are supposed to be parallel constructions.

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1 Comments:

At 3:11 PM, August 01, 2009 Anonymous Deborah Godin had this to say...

I'll see your notice, and raise you the sign in my local tuck shop:

NO SHIRT
NO SHOES
NO PETS
NO SERVICE

 

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