>>>>,,,,>>>>

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I may have imagined it, but this is what I thought I saw yesterday morning at about 6:15, written as graffiti on a wall in Washington, DC (unless the Metro train was still zipping through Silver Spring at the time):

MORE MORE MORE MORE COMMA COMMA COMMA COMMA MORE MORE MORE MORE

The reason I think I might have misread it is that it seems so unlikely that a graffiti artist would be inspired to paint an apparent plea for more punctuation.

Also I have little confidence in my powers of observation at the moment when I (thought I) saw it, because it was too early and I was sleepy and already worn out even before I got to the airport to head for home. But maybe there's a Language Log reader near Washington who rides the Red Line between Forest Glen and Gallery Place who can tell me whether the sign exists outside my imagination. It's on the left as you head for Gallery Place, on the right as you head for Forest Glen (and I think not far from the Brookland-CUA stop).

I hope I saw it right. It amused me almost as much as the sign David Robinson told me about today, a sign he saw recently in the Milwaukee airport just beyond the security check:

Recombobulation Area



20 Comments

  1. t. simenon said,

    May 12, 2009 @ 11:35 pm

    Take that branch of the red line often, will keep an eye out…

  2. jsf said,

    May 12, 2009 @ 11:58 pm

    You aren't the only one to be amused by that sign. Recombobulation Area was recently voted Most Creative Word of 2008 by the American Dialect Society. (ADS post)

  3. Ransom said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 12:42 am

    I would believe that as graffiti, but would interpret "comma" not as the name of a punctuation mark, but as a phonetic reimagining of "come on".

  4. Nobody! said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 1:33 am

    Funny, I read it as a sort of mega-greed statement, like a crazy emphasis of more, more, more, more. COMMA reminded me of telegrams using STOP for punctuation.

  5. Sili said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 3:57 am

    To me it looks like a smiley when you 'translate' it.

    Could it be like people who actually say "lol" and type out "ell oh ell"?

  6. Sili said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 3:58 am

    I shoulda signed that "colon dash close parenthesis".

  7. Quendus said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 5:14 am

    It looks rather like >_>, which is one of the slightly-less-commonly used smileys around on the internet and could plausibly be written as >,> (especially if the middle character is taken to represent a nose rather than a mouth) and expanded (for some reason) to >>>>,,,,>>>>.

  8. Nigel Greenwood said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 5:16 am

    Actually, I was reminded of the old joke about an Italian spelling the word "Mississippi".

  9. Karen said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 5:32 am

    I was on that train Friday, but didn't notice it. If I have time I'll try to see it later this week, but I don't normally ride the Red Line.

  10. Randy Hudson said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 7:39 am

    I was wondering if Comma was the name of a band or something. Apparently there WAS a band Comma, "a great young prog metal band from Turkey", but that seems unlikely in this context.

    The band Brakes has a song titled "comma comma comma, full stop". That's the entire lyrics of the song, which lasts 4 seconds.

    And I found an apparent reference to David Bowie's "Karma Chameleon" — "comma comma comma comma Chameleon".

  11. Amy Stoller said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 8:08 am

    @ Randy Hudson: Karma Chameleon was written by Jon Moss, Michael Craig, Roy Hay and Phil Pickett, and possibly Boy George (George O'Dowd), and recorded by Culture Club.

    Am I dating myself by admitting that it was the first thing I thought of, too?

  12. Katy said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 10:49 am

    Yes! I see that odd string every day on my commute into the city from Glenmont. It's always puzzled me too. Perhaps it's intended to be an inverted ditto sign — the tagger, tired at 3:30 a.m. of writing his name over and over again, decided that the comma was a good way to indicate "repeat here"?

  13. Chris said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 11:50 am

    Was it written in one line, or three lines, or what?

  14. Sally Thomason said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 12:24 pm

    It's all written in one line (but I couldn't figure out how to get the Language Log editor to put it all on one line).

  15. Eli said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 1:09 pm

    My first thought was that it was something akin to what Quendus mentioned about the >_> smiley, which I use myself. I'd take >,,,> to be a face with teeth showing, for example, though I can't really imagine a suitable context. As for what you've seen though, I can't say.

  16. Nigel Greenwood said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 5:38 pm

    @Sally Thomason: It's all written in one line (but I couldn't figure out how to get the Language Log editor to put it all on one line).

    Don't know whether this will work, but here goes …

    MORE MORE MORE MORE COMMA COMMA COMMA COMMA MORE MORE MORE MORE

  17. Karen said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 8:50 pm

    The thing is, it's WORDS not punctuation, so it's highly unlikely to be a smiley. (I had some time this morning so I yielded to temptation and went in late…)

  18. Philip Spaelti said,

    May 13, 2009 @ 11:04 pm

    This might be a boring suggestion, but has anyone considered that this was just practice? Perhaps the "artist" felt he had difficulty with "M" and "O" and chose certain words to practice those letters. People around here are always so focussed on the meaning that sometimes they forget that there are things that have no meaning.

  19. Nicole Gustas said,

    May 14, 2009 @ 1:15 am

    Huh. I just passed through the Recombobulation Area on Monday. I took a photo, and it's over here: http://rednikki.livejournal.com/1376694.html

  20. John Curran said,

    May 20, 2009 @ 1:21 pm

    From which side of the train should I look for it?

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