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From the New Scientist

AS DOCTORS know only too well, as soon as you give a syndrome a name it starts popping up all over the place. So at the end of last year, when we coined the term semiopathy--the phenomenon of reading inappropriate emotions into signs--dozens of readers discovered that they were semiopathologists. And, in the best academic tradition, it's time to create some sub-disciplines.

First come the "time-flies" signs, named after the grammar-wrenching line from Groucho Marx: "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." Thus, is the sign "Crocodiles Do Not Swim Here" at the Jinja Sailing Club in Zimbabwe an announcement that they've decided to walk, or an injunction to literate crocodilians? And unfortunately for keen young lads, it seems unlikely that the sign outside the Sports Club in Bombay, India, reading "First hump 116 yards ahead" refers to a much-anticipated experience.

Advertisers seem particularly keen on getting the wrong message across. What proud parent would want to buy Boots' "Extra Thick Baby Wipes" for their little Einstein? And who would stop at the farm near Edinburgh announcing "Burning logs and peat for sale", unless they were really fed up with their car interior? And Janis Cortese was tickled by a spam e-mail promising that she could "attract men with larger breasts". However, she tells us she would generally prefer to attract men who have no discernible breasts of any kind.

A subspecies of time-flies inhabits the world of instructions and warnings. Thus Paul Dear has never dared comply with the plaintive request from his computer printer: "Input Jam".

Regulations tend to evolve toward greater complexity, George Daughters hypothesises, after seeing the street sign "No trucks allowed" metamorphose into "No trucks between 6 am and 7 pm eastbound on Route 16 on Tuesdays over 8 tons". He claims never to have seen a Tuesday that was an ounce over 2 tons.

Only an Australian Department of Posthumous Jurisprudence could be responsible for the sign at a railway crossing in Melbourne: "Warning! Touching overhead wires causes instant death!...Penalty $200." And outside the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency establishment at Fort Halstead in Kent you are, apparently, warned that "Police Club Visitors". Best not go there, then.

Our second sub-discipline is what we'll call "domain-specific semiopathy". While the time-flies inhabit language in general, this specifically infests jargon. For example, it will be cosmologists, mostly, who will be tickled by the sign in the car park by the Co-op store in Wadebridge, Cornwall, saying "Please wait for space to appear". Neurologists, meanwhile, may not be terribly optimistic that they'll reach their destination if they get into a cab displaying the company name "ATAXIS" on the roof. And it took a zoologist to be baffled by the advertisement in this magazine some time ago for a "small ruminant scientist".

Psychiatrists, on the other hand, may feel empathy with the "baffled fermenters" that Margaret Clotworthy keeps hearing about in lectures on industrial bioprocessing. And they'll certainly avoid depending too much on the product in the truck with the big revolving drum that Peter Milner followed through Auckland: "Certified Concrete".

Someone has probably tried to avoid psychiatric-semiopathic tendencies in the warning on the lids of jars of sauce: "Reject if the safety button can be depressed". Note the "can be". Several cruel readers, however, persist in trying, telling it that it has no friends and no hope, before taking it home anyway.

Our last sub-discipline will, by nature, be the hardest in which to produce statistically significant studies. Serendipitous semiopathy is notoriously dependent on happenstance--as when a few months ago Richard Proctor saw a sign reading "Police Accident" and drove carefully round the corner, to find a police car in the hedge.