Hope

Despite what they're reporting in the news these days, hope is not dead. Reverse side of a tombstone, Arlington National Cemetery, July 2009. (For more Arlington tombstones, click the "Arlington" tag below or on the right side of this page.)

Dry Cleaning Sign

Sigh. Someone told me about this sign before, but I didn't actually believe it existed before I saw it in person last night. Dupont Circle.

Justice Inscription

"LEGE ATQVE ORDINE OMNIA FIVNT" (Let all things be done according to law and order). Latin inscription above entrance, Department of Justice.

Disorienting Braille Maps

Braille maps feature prominently in "America on the Move," an ongoing exhibition at the National Museum of American History). This map depicting streetcar paths in DC circa 1900 provides inscriptions in raised letters along with Braille dots. You can also use your fingers to trace the contours of the city and discern the routes streetcars could take as they moved people about the city. Note the standard map orientation here, with north as as "up."

This map depicting harbor travel in New York City in the 1920s is a little more complicated. It includes inscriptions and Braille dots on either side of the map, so that side that is "up" is not based on absolute cardinal directions - instead, what is "up" depends on how you are positioned in relation to the map.

(For related posts, click the "Braille" tag below or on the right hand side of this page.)

Art of the Parking Garage (National Building Museum ad)

This exhibition at the National Building Museum has now come and gone, but this ad was so clever I thought I should add it to this blog. I love the implied mathematical equation here: snail shell + parking sign = [implied result: spiral parking garage]. Read more about the photography exhibition here. Ad seen somewhere on the metro, May 2010.

Inuit Writing System (Canadian Embassy)

Last month I spotted these signs at the Canadian Embassy advertising an exhibition of Inuit prints. According to the press release, this exhibit offers "a distinctive portrait of Inuit life and culture in the Canadian Arctic." As usual, the Canadian Embassy poster is in English and French, but it also includes some text in the Inuit language (i.e., the names of the artists). One distinctive feature of the Inuktitut syllabary is its method for representing vowels; the vowel sounds are indicated by the orientation of the symbols (it's easier to see how this works by looking at the chart on this page).

Here's another sign nearby. I don't know what the text actually means here, but the photo at least gives you a better sense of what the script looks like.

For more about this exhibition, see this NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) blog posting.

P.S. I took this photo nearly two years ago (!) but somehow never got around to blogging about it. The poster below (also taken at the Canadian Embassy) advertises "Champlain's Dream" (in French: "Le rêve de Champlain"). This exhibit focused on French exploration of North America, revealing the intertwined histories of present-day New England and Quebec:

In case you're interested, you can see the Washington Post's excellent review (with online gallery).

P.S. For earlier postings about the Canadian Embassy, see here and here.

New Car Rental Sign (Chinatown)

The "Thrifty Car Rental" sign I posted about last year (see here) has since been replaced by a new one! This space is now a Hertz Rental Car, and the writing looks much better. Here, "Hertz" = 赫兹 (Hè zī), conveniently borrowing the standard transliteration of the unit of measurement (Hz) named after German scientist Heinrich Hertz. "Rental car" = 租车. This sign uses the simplified form of car (车) while the previous one used the traditional form 車. Photo taken in early 2010.

Sign(s) for Pork - Asian Supermarket

Today I noticed this character 豚 indicating the pork section at an Asian supermarket in Fairfax, VA. Although it features the "pig" radical (豕), this character is actually different from what I'm accustomed to seeing in Mandarin Chinese (where "pork" is written 豬肉 - literally, "pig meat"). In Japanese, pork is written 豚肉（ぶたにく = butaniku). Evidently the same characters 豚肉 can be used in Korean too, although I don't know what the pronunciation would be.

P.S. In Chinese 豬 can mean either "pig" or "boar" (hence when you see 豬年 on one of those Chinese Zodiac charts it's sometimes translated as "Year of the Pig" or "Year of the Boar"). In Japanese, the character 豚 is reserved only for "pig" while 豬 means "boar."

The Language of Flags (Navy Memorial)

Signal flags adorning a ship mast at the US Navy Memorial (across from the National Archives), September 2010. The International Code of Signals designates a flag for each letter in the Roman alphabet, plus each Arabic numeral (see here for more). Ships use such flags to communicate important messages to one another on the sea.

P.S. You can see some earlier posts for other takes on "the language of flags" - i.e., the special language that is used in order to describe flags, and the ways flags themselves can communicate symbolic meanings.

P.P.S. No, I don't know what these flags say! If anyone knows the code, let me know...

Obsolete Library Catalog Cards (Library of Congress)

The emergence of the online public-access catalog has largely rendered the traditional library card catalog obsolete. At the Library of Congress, which has a searchable online catalog, this point is made especially clear: old paper catalog cards are unceremoniously stacked among blank pieces of scrap paper. Above is a sampling of old cards I picked up this afternoon (click to enlarge). Counter-clockwise from top left: records for 2 films in English, then other items in German, Spanish, Danish, Russian, and 2 in Hungarian.

For an engaging history of the library card catalog, see here. To see some creative ways of using "retired" library catalog cards, see here.