Weird Canadian Signposts

Canada has two officials languages, English and French. Or, maybe they don't have any official language. Anyway, many or most signs are printed in both English and French. This is often disconcerting or odd. Product packaging is cluttered with twice as much wording as in single-language locales.

Many signs combine the two languages cleverly, taking advantage of the noun-adjective inversion between English and French, especially in store or company names. For instance we went to a movie at a place called the Crystal Palace, and their sign read "Palais Crystal Palace".

For road signs, the transit authority often avoids the issue by removing words altogether. For instance, one-way signs, do-not-enter signs, and yield signs do not have words on them, as they do in America; but stop signs for some reason do retain the word STOP, usually paired with ARRET. On hiways, exit signs sometimes have both the words EXIT and SORTIE, but more often have no word, just a number on a lopsided quadriateral. Although I am certainly not the kind of person to defend or commend anything Canadian, French, or French-Canadian, I have to say that I like the idea of taking words off of some road signs, when they are not needed. Is it really necessary for our do-not-enter signs to have the internationally recognizable red-and-white symbol as well as the redundant wording?

The idea of using a symbol instead of words, however, can be taken too far. The obvious important point is that the symbol must be easily, quickly, unambiguously recognizable. Canada has signs which sometimes fail this standard. Along the road in America we have symbols for visitor services, such as gasoline (a gas pump), camping (a tent), or restaurants (plate and silverware). Canada also has those same (or similar) symbols, but they have a slew of other symbols, some easy to recognize, some difficult. The following are all found on little square signs underneath or near signs for hiway exits, and there is a very very large variety of them.

Easy to recognize:

• Fork, knife, cup (restaurant)
• Gas pump (gasoline)
• Person in bed with roof (hotel)
• Person in wheenchair (handicap access, perhaps for a bathroom)
• A golfer (golf course)
• A skiier (ski hill)
• A question mark (visitor information)
• A capital H (hospitol)
• Picnic table and tree (picnic area)
• Observatory (a sky observatory, presumably)

A little harder:

• Apple and corn (grocery store? farmers market?)
• Person in bed alongside a soft-boiled egg (bed and breakfast, we think, but who eats soft boiled eggs?)
• Hand holding a pot (pottery store?)
• A flower in a little house (greenhouse? flower shop?)
• A skeleton key (museum?)
• A museum with an M inside it (also a museum, but then what is the skeleton key?)
• A museum without the M (a museum? not a museum? maybe a university?)
• An atom (nuclean plant? research university?)

Downright confusing:

• Patch of grass with a swirl coming out of it (magic genie grass?)
• A wavy 4-lined seashell (post-modern maritime art store?)
• A beaver enclosed in a uterus-shaped outline (beaver nursery?)
• The flowery three-pointed boy scout symbol (scout camp? actually I think it is a police symbol)
• Two gears (factory?)
• Microscope (scientist's home?)
• Hand putting items into a basket (shopping center?)

And after all those symbols, one stands out from all the rest: the word "Police" written out. If you can come up with a symbol for a patch of magic genie grass, why can't you come up with a symbol for the police? I suppose, however, that they chose that word because it applies in both English and French.