Sunday, August 14, 2011

Tastes like chicken

For a few weeks now a farm store near here has had a sign out front featuring the following stack of words with no punctuation:

FLAVORED
DEER
CORN
MUCK
BOOTS

Am I the only one who wants to distribute the adjective "flavored" across the entire group of nouns?

When we hear that someone is dressed in a black hat, coat, and gloves, it's easy to interpret the adjective (black) as modifying all three of the nouns: black hat, black coat, black gloves. A similar strategy applied to the farm store's sign gives us flavored deer, flavored corn, flavored muck, flavored boots.

Eww.

Flavored deer corn and flavored muck boots?

Double eww.

Either we're suffering an unprecedented outbreak of muck-boot fetishism here in rural America or else the sign needs some serious editing.

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