Why Grammar Matters: A Place To Discuss Matters Of Grammar

[Browncoat]

This has got to be one of the most awkwardly written headlines ever:

"Child dies after father trips on grocery bag while being held."

[Leeds]

7 hours ago, Browncoat said:

This has got to be one of the most awkwardly written headlines ever:

"Child dies after father trips on grocery bag while being held."

What does it even mean?

[Bastet]

I think it means a man who was holding his child tripped on a grocery bag and fell, and his child was crushed to death as a result, but, even if I correctly deciphered it, that's a terrible headline.

[Browncoat]

4 hours ago, Bastet said:

I think it means a man who was holding his child tripped on a grocery bag and fell, and his child was crushed to death as a result, but, even if I correctly deciphered it, that's a terrible headline.

That is what it means -- I clicked through to make sure.  But yes, I had a hard time figuring out whether the man, the grocery bag, or the child was being held.

[ABay]

My first impression was that the man was being held by the police.

[Milburn Stone]

This is the real awfulness of a generation that never learned to write. It doesn't matter if you never learned to write if your job is paving roads. But when a child has died, and because you got assigned to write the story, and you don't have the brains God gave you, people now literally do not know how this terrible, tragic event occurred...that's a problem that goes beyond your own stupidity.

Edited June 11, 2022 by Milburn Stone

[Zella]

Being able or unable to write is not dependent on generation. Some of the worst writers I've ever dealt with as an editor were of the generation that "learned to write." Good writers and bad writers exist in any generation. 

Edited June 11, 2022 by Zella

[Irlandesa]

Plus, we don't know the age and background of the person writing the headline.  So often the people who write the articles aren't the same people tasked with coming up with the headlines.

I've seen quite a few authors disavow the sensational headlines for an otherwise normal article. 

[Milburn Stone]

@Zella and @Irlandesa, you raise good and true points about age and background. You also point my mind in the direction of the age, background, and qualifications of 1) the editor who let this headline through and 2) the person who hired the person who wrote the headline or let it through.

I do know this: If you made me bet $100 one way or the other on the demographics, I've no doubt which side I'd put my money on. Fully prepared to lose it! But not expecting to.

[shapeshifter]

9 hours ago, Irlandesa said:

Plus, we don't know the age and background of the person writing the headline.  So often the people who write the articles aren't the same people tasked with coming up with the headlines.

59 minutes ago, Milburn Stone said:

You also point my mind in the direction of the age, background, and qualifications of 1) the editor who let this headline through and 2) the person who hired the person who wrote the headline or let it through.

A daughter who wrote for a newspaper her first 10 years out of college (ages 22-32) had to wearily remind me several times that neither she nor anyone she worked with had any control over the wording of the headlines. This was 2001-2011, when many local papers were becoming online-only and then being bought up by larger media enterprises.

The article referenced above explains that the child likely died as a result of repeated abuse; the man’s claim of it being accidental was seemingly bogus, but no legal determination had been made as of the time of publication. Perhaps the headline constructor gave up on conveying anything meaningful.😶

Edited June 11, 2022 by shapeshifter

[Cinnabon]

1 hour ago, shapeshifter said:

A daughter who wrote for a newspaper her first 10 years out of college (ages 22-32) had to wearily remind me several times that neither she nor anyone she worked with had any control over the wording of the headlines. This was 2001-2011, when many local papers were becoming online-only and then being bought up by larger media enterprises.

The article referenced above explains that the child likely died as a result of repeated abuse; the man’s claim of it being accidental was seemingly bogus, but no legal determination had been made as of the time of publication. Perhaps the headline constructor gave up on conveying anything meaningful.😶

So who wrote the headlines if they didn’t work there?

[shapeshifter]

16 minutes ago, Cinnabon said:

So who wrote the headlines if they didn’t work there?

1 hour ago, shapeshifter said:

A daughter who wrote for a newspaper her first 10 years out of college (ages 22-32) had to wearily remind me several times that neither she nor anyone she worked with had any control over the wording of the headlines. This was 2001-2011, when many local papers were becoming online-only and then being bought up by larger media enterprises.

The article referenced above explains that the child likely died as a result of repeated abuse; the man’s claim of it being accidental was seemingly bogus, but no legal determination had been made as of the time of publication. Perhaps the headline constructor gave up on conveying anything meaningful.😶

Someone working for the larger media company that bought her newspaper would have written the headlines. 
This was over 10 years ago, but it may still be something similar, as @Irlandesa notes too:

10 hours ago, Irlandesa said:

I've seen quite a few authors disavow the sensational headlines for an otherwise normal article. 

The next time we talk, I'll try to remember to ask her if she even submitted titles with the copy for the articles. I think she did, but maybe that changed over time. 🤔

[shapeshifter]

Meanwhile . . . 

[Irlandesa]

I also think that part of the difference isn't generational but the willingness to invest in editors.  From what I understand, in publishing, there are fewer resources spent on editors who proofread than in the past.  So it's not about being taught how to write but rather than devaluing of profession writing.

But also, for the record, I had no problem figuring out what that headline was trying to say.  That's where critical thinking and deduction comes into play of what would the news cover and what is the most likely scenario of what happened.

[Milburn Stone]

1 hour ago, Irlandesa said:

But also, for the record, I had no problem figuring out what that headline was trying to say. 

I congratulate you for being able to decipher what I found to be indecipherable. (And I tried.) 

Discussions of who wrote the headline are irrelevant, because, as far as I know, no individual has been named the culprit. The point is that somebody wrote it, and that somebody has no business writing headlines (or anything else, for that matter).

[shapeshifter]

43 minutes ago, Milburn Stone said:

I congratulate you for being able to decipher what I found to be indecipherable. (And I tried.) Discussions of who wrote the headline are irrelevant, because, as far as I know, no individual has been named the culprit. The point is that somebody wrote it, and that somebody has no business writing headlines (or anything else, for that matter).

Well, you're not wrong, @Milburn Stone.

• It looks like the "headline" may have been worded by the police,
  pahomepage.com/state-news-2/pennsylvania-man-says-his-baby-died-because-his-foot-was-caught-in-a-grocery-bag-and-fell-on-the-child
  and:
• regarding the "author" of the article, well, is he an author???
  wtrf.com/author/john-lynch-2

Maybe when my former-journalist daughter grows weary of being a 9-1-1 dispatcher, those doing the hiring in media will have come to their senses and hire her instead of that so-called author.

Edited June 11, 2022 by shapeshifter

[Milburn Stone]

4 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

• It looks like the "headline" may have been worded by the police,
  pahomepage.com/state-news-2/pennsylvania-man-says-his-baby-died-because-his-foot-was-caught-in-a-grocery-bag-and-fell-on-the-child
  and:
• regarding the "author" of the article, well, is he an author???
  wtrf.com/author/john-lynch-2

Maybe when my former-journalist daughter grows weary of being a 9-1-1 dispatcher, those doing the hiring in media will have come to their senses and hire her instead of that so-called author.

I've no doubt that would be an improvement, @shapeshifter.

The police may have worded a press release in that way. No matter. It's the job of a journalist to take a look at an important press release that makes no sense and make sense out of it. For the public good.

And if the journalist isn't up to the task, it's up to the editor. Or the publisher.

Somebody let that headline go out on a news service. 

[Leeds]

9 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

Well, you're not wrong, @Milburn Stone.

• It looks like the "headline" may have been worded by the police,
  pahomepage.com/state-news-2/pennsylvania-man-says-his-baby-died-because-his-foot-was-caught-in-a-grocery-bag-and-fell-on-the-child
  and:

So in fact it was an errant foot that killed the child?

Edited June 12, 2022 by Leeds

[shapeshifter]

Spoken by Seth McFarlane as The Orville character Captain Ed Mercer in episode 3.3 "Mortality Paradox," June 16, 2022:

• "Gordon, prep a shuttle. You, Bortus, and Talla are with Kelly and I."

Ugh. Oh Seth. Do you think William Shatner  would ever say "You are with Dr. McCoy and I" or Frank Sinatra would ever say "You are with Deano and I"???

[meowmommy]

3 hours ago, shapeshifter said:

Ugh. Oh Seth. Do you think William Shatner  would ever say "You are with Dr. McCoy and I" or Frank Sinatra would ever say "You are with Deano and I"???

The first instinct should be to blame the writers and the director, although the actor also ought to have a responsibility to point out when grammar has boldly gone where no man has gone before.

[So, of course, I'm obligated to point out the obvious. "To boldly go where no man has gone before" splits an infinitive and unnecessarily ends a clause with a preposition.]

[legaleagle53]

12 hours ago, meowmommy said:

The first instinct should be to blame the writers and the director, although the actor also ought to have a responsibility to point out when grammar has boldly gone where no man has gone before.

[So, of course, I'm obligated to point out the obvious. "To boldly go where no man has gone before" splits an infinitive and unnecessarily ends a clause with a preposition.]

Neither of which was ever a real rule in English. Both were superimpositions by 18th Century grammarians who insisted that English should be more like Latin. Latin can't have split infinitives because Latin infinitives are a single word; there is no counterpart to the "to" in "to go." And Latin can never end a sentence with a preposition because Latin prepositions must always govern an object, from which it can never be separated.

That said, the clause in question doesn't end with a preposition in any event. "Before" isn't a preposition as it's used here. It's an adverb of time, so it CAN end the clause.

Edited June 17, 2022 by legaleagle53

[meowmommy]

1 hour ago, legaleagle53 said:

Latin can't have split infinitives because Latin infinitives are a single word; there is no counterpart to the "to" in "to go."

Yeah, I took a couple of years of Latin 50 years ago.  I think I can still conjugate a few verbs, and you are correct, of course, that Latin infinitives don't allow for "to."

1 hour ago, legaleagle53 said:

"Before" isn't a preposition as it's used here. It's an adverb of time, so it CAN end the clause.

Before is also a preposition of time.  Adverbs still need to be modifying something, and I don't see what it's modifying in the clause.  I will, however, defer to true grammarians, which I cannot claim to be.

[SVNBob]

15 hours ago, meowmommy said:

[So, of course, I'm obligated to point out the obvious. "To boldly go where no man has gone before" splits an infinitive and unnecessarily ends a clause with a preposition.]

Which of course leads to the grammar joke of "to boldly split infinitives that no one has split before."

[Haleth]

"To boldly go" has a nicer cadence than "to go boldly."  They get a pass from me on that one.

[shapeshifter]

6 hours ago, meowmommy said:

Before is also a preposition of time.  Adverbs still need to be modifying something, and I don't see what it's modifying in the clause.  I will, however, defer to true grammarians, which I cannot claim to be.

Nor can I claim to be a grammarian.

But now I am reminded of Mom warning us away from adopting a turn of phrase frequently used by those around our new home in the Chicago suburbs when we moved there from New England in 1963. 
It was the custom at that time in that part of the Midwest to be invited to go somewhere by being asked:   
   “Do you want to come with?”   
Later, at home and out of earshot of the offending speaker lest she be rude, Mom repeated what she had heard and then scornfully asked:   
   “With what?”  
   “With whom?”  
——in such a way that we would be sure to never utter such an egregious grammatical error ourselves.

A few years later I don’t recall any other family members watching Star Trek with me, but now I can imagine Mom asking disdainfully:   
   “Boldly go before what?” 

I don’t know. Was it Shatner’s sonorous voice that made the declaration? If so, Mom might have given him a pass, considering “before” to be an adverb modifying “to go,”  
——if that’s grammatically correct enough. 

But Mom would only have allowed it if she heard Shatner’s voice without seeing him dressed in his Star Fleet uniform. Mom was also very fashion conscious and critical.

Edited June 17, 2022 by shapeshifter

[Lugal]

13 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

Neither of which was ever a real rule in English. Both were superimpositions by 18th Century grammarians who insisted that English should be more like Latin. Latin can't have split infinitives because Latin infinitives are a single word; there is no counterpart to the "to" in "to go." And Latin can never end a sentence with a preposition because Latin prepositions must always govern an object, from which it can never be separated.

Yup, we've been splitting infinitives since the 13th century.

6 hours ago, Haleth said:

"To boldly go" has a nicer cadence than "to go boldly."  They get a pass from me on that one.

It works with the inherent rhythm of English much better.  Old English poetry followed a similar meter.  To bold-ly go.  If you use: To go bold-ly or Bold-ly to go, you end up with two stressed or two unstressed syllables together and it doesn't sound as good.

12 hours ago, meowmommy said:

Before is also a preposition of time.  Adverbs still need to be modifying something, and I don't see what it's modifying in the clause.  I will, however, defer to true grammarians, which I cannot claim to be.

It's modifying the verb gone.

Edited June 17, 2022 by Lugal
Realized the verb go appears as an infinitve and a perfect tense form

[Milburn Stone]

13 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

Neither of which was ever a real rule in English.

My subjective opinion: Sentences that take care not to split an infinitive sound better than sentences that split infinitives. Both to the ear, and the inner ear.

Compare the sentence I just wrote to this: Sentences that take care to not split an infinitive sound better...

To my ear, not even close.

[SoMuchTV]

That is the kind nonsense up with which I will not put!  (Sorry, too lazy to get the exact quote & proper attribution.)

Edited June 18, 2022 by SoMuchTV

[praeceptrix]

6 minutes ago, SoMuchTV said:

That is the kind nonsense up with which I will not put!  (Sorry, to lazy to get the exact quote & proper attribution.)

You sent me down a Google rabbit hole (my fault, of course!). I found quite a few memes/images with variations of the wording. According to this article, it's not really by Winston Churchill. Not that surprising, but now I am worried that some of my favorite Churchill quotes are also misattributed. Oh well, it's still a great quote.

[SuprSuprElevated]

"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes."

- Winston Churchill

[shapeshifter]

53 minutes ago, SoMuchTV said:

That is the kind nonsense up with which I will not put! 

42 minutes ago, praeceptrix said:

it's not really by Winston Churchill.

It doesn’t sound at all Churchillian to me——more like some relation of Yoda.

[SoMuchTV]

9 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

It doesn’t sound at all Churchillian to me——more like some relation of Yoda.

It was supposed to be a response to someone being pedantic about not ending a sentence with a preposition.  Good story, anyway.

[legaleagle53]

On 6/16/2022 at 9:58 PM, meowmommy said:

Yeah, I took a couple of years of Latin 50 years ago.  I think I can still conjugate a few verbs, and you are correct, of course, that Latin infinitives don't allow for "to."

Before is also a preposition of time.  Adverbs still need to be modifying something, and I don't see what it's modifying in the clause.  I will, however, defer to true grammarians, which I cannot claim to be.

As a preposition, "before" is a preposition of place, not time.

In this case, "before" is an adverb of time modifying the compound verb "has gone" that immediately precedes it. And if you will remember your Latin, there was an equivalent temporal adverb: "antea" ("ante" is the preposition -- "before" in the locative sense -- and "antequam" is the corresponding temporal conjunction (as in "Wake me up before you go.").

[legaleagle53]

On 6/17/2022 at 4:00 AM, shapeshifter said:

Nor can I claim to be a grammarian.

But now I am reminded of Mom warning us away from adopting a turn of phrase frequently used by those around our new home in the Chicago suburbs when we moved there from New England in 1963. 
It was the custom at that time in that part of the Midwest to be invited to go somewhere by being asked:   
   “Do you want to come with?”   
Later, at home and out of earshot of the offending speaker lest she be rude, Mom repeated what she had heard and then scornfully asked:   
   “With what?”  
   “With whom?”  
——in such a way that we would be sure to never utter such an egregious grammatical error ourselves.

A few years later I don’t recall any other family members watching Star Trek with me, but now I can imagine Mom asking disdainfully:   
   “Boldly go before what?” 

I don’t know. Was it Shatner’s sonorous voice that made the declaration? If so, Mom might have given him a pass, considering “before” to be an adverb modifying “to go,”  
——if that’s grammatically correct enough. 

But Mom would only have allowed it if she heard Shatner’s voice without seeing him dressed in his Star Fleet uniform. Mom was also very fashion conscious and critical.

Mom clearly never studied German or any other languages related to English. That's a very common practice in those languages. For example, in German, we'd say "Kommst du mit?" ("Are you coming with?") No German would ever ask "Mit wem?" ("With whom?") in response, because "mit mir" ("with me") is understood. Words like "mit" are called separable prefixes, and they are the origin of our practice of ending sentences with prepositions.

Edited June 18, 2022 by legaleagle53

[meowmommy]

37 minutes ago, legaleagle53 said:

As a preposition, "before" is a preposition of place, not time.

Before the dawn...before morning...before noon...before sunset.  Those can't be adverbs because adverbs can't modify nouns, right?

I'm not being whiny; I really want to know.

[legaleagle53]

1 minute ago, meowmommy said:

Before the dawn...before morning...before noon...before sunset.  Those can't be adverbs because adverbs can't modify nouns, right?

I'm not being whiny; I really want to know.

Correct. "Before" in those phrases is a preposition, not an adverb. Adverbs can only modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs, never nouns.

The problem is that many words like "before" can be used as different parts of speech in English, and one has to rely on the context to understand how they are being used in a given sentence.

[shapeshifter]

11 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

Mom clearly never studied German or any other languages related to English. That's a very common practice in those languages. For example, in German, we'd say "Kommst du mit?" ("Are you coming with?") No German would ever ask "Mit wem?" ("With whom?") in response, because "mit mir" ("with me") is understood. Words like "mit" are called separable prefixes, and they are the origin of our practice of ending sentences with prepositions.

No, Mom just studied French Spanish and some Latin (and, much later, Hawaiian).

Thanks for the explanation, @legaleagle53.
Yet another mystery is solved of an odd memory that has been occasionally bubbling to the surface of my conscious thought for half a century. 

Do Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish follow the same Germanic syntax of the "separable prefixes"? There were a lot of kids in my school whose ancestors were from those places. 

Edited June 19, 2022 by shapeshifter
faulty memory moment

[legaleagle53]

29 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

No, Mom just studied French and some Latin (and, much later, Hawaiian).

Thanks for the explanation, @legaleagle53.
Yet another mystery is solved of an odd memory that has been occasionally bubbling to the surface of my conscious thought for half a century. 

Do Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish follow the same Germanic syntax of the "separable prefixes"? There were a lot of kids in my school whose ancestors were from those places. 

Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch do, since they're all Germanic languages. Finnish, however, is NOT a Germanic language. Its closest relative is Hungarian, so it's an entirely different animal.

[shapeshifter]

10 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Dutch do, since they're all Germanic languages. Finnish, however, is NOT a Germanic language. Its closest relative is Hungarian, so it's an entirely different animal.

Interesting.
Actually, there was just one Finnish girl in junior high (middle school), and I'm not sure if she ever said "Would you like to go with?" Maybe.
Likely if she did use that Germanic speech pattern, it would be because she was a recent transfer to Illinois from Quebec who was used to picking up local speech patterns. She had virtually no accent.
Finland was her place of birth. She told me that when she dreamed, it was always repeated in the 3 languages of Finnish, French, and English. 

Edited June 19, 2022 by shapeshifter

[Haleth]

9 hours ago, legaleagle53 said:

Its closest relative is Hungarian, so it's an entirely different animal.

It took me until recently to realize Hungary refers to the Huns.  So the language would be akin to others that evolved on the Western Steppe/Caucasus/Russia?  (I'm sorry this is getting way off topic, but it's so interesting!)

[Milburn Stone]

On 6/17/2022 at 6:00 AM, shapeshifter said:

But now I am reminded of Mom warning us away from adopting a turn of phrase frequently used by those around our new home in the Chicago suburbs when we moved there from New England in 1963. 
It was the custom at that time in that part of the Midwest to be invited to go somewhere by being asked:   
   “Do you want to come with?”   
Later, at home and out of earshot of the offending speaker lest she be rude, Mom repeated what she had heard and then scornfully asked:   
   “With what?”  
   “With whom?”  
——in such a way that we would be sure to never utter such an egregious grammatical error ourselves.

I love this, because it could be my own story, with a few alterations. I too came to the Chicago suburbs from the East Coast. The year was 1971 (close enough to 1963). And I was a grad student, not still in the bosom of my family. (But you were older by 1971 too!) And I was flummoxed by that usage I was hearing everywhere, "Want to come with?," with the missing final pronoun.

Thank you, @legaleagle53, for clearing up the mystery after all these years!

I'm fascinated by how the grammatical structure of home countries can influence the way English is spoken. Many Asian immigrants over the decades have spoken what was derisively called "pigeon English," but one day, years and years ago, I had the blinding epiphany that they were simply applying to English the correct grammatical structures of their native languages.

Edited June 19, 2022 by Milburn Stone

[supposebly]

Finnish and Hungarian belong to the Finno-Ugric language family.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Finno-Ugric-languages

The Wikipedia article has a map:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages

It's a bit under debate for some of the languages whether they are all part of it. 

[Zella]

3 hours ago, Haleth said:

It took me until recently to realize Hungary refers to the Huns.  So the language would be akin to others that evolved on the Western Steppe/Caucasus/Russia?  (I'm sorry this is getting way off topic, but it's so interesting!)

Russian isn't related to Hungarian. It's not a Slavic language. I've studied Russian at a very basic level and can pick up some related words in other Slavic languages. Like, I was watching something in Czech and could pick up a few words that had some overlap with Russian. Not at all with Hungarian, though it is definitely a very interesting language. 

[Lugal]

4 hours ago, Haleth said:

It took me until recently to realize Hungary refers to the Huns.  So the language would be akin to others that evolved on the Western Steppe/Caucasus/Russia?  (I'm sorry this is getting way off topic, but it's so interesting!)

Warning!  Historical linguistics deep dive!

Hungarian is of the Uralic family, specifically the Ugric branch.  Its closest relatives are east of the Ural mountains.  The Magyars (Hungarians) migrated from there about a thousand years ago.

As for the language of the Huns, there's a pretty lively debate about that.  The usual theory is that they spoke some kind of Altaic language (usually Turkic, sometimes, Mongolic), but even that is a guess.  Attila, the most famous Hun, had a Gothic name (meaning "little father") and Gothic was probably a lingua franca in the Hun empire (the Huns were probably pretty multi-ethnic).  There was only like three words of Hunnic recorded by the Romans, and they sound vaguely Slavic.  All of these theories can still be cast into doubt.  Like Attila was a Hunnic word that sounded like "little father" in Gothic or the informant that those three words came from was a Slavic speaker.

Another theory is that Hunnic was Yeniseian.  And this comes from the idea that the Huns split off from the Xiongnu confederation who lived north of China, who did seem to have a Yeniseian element in their language (they also seem to have been multi-ethnic).  Yeniseian is only spoken by the Ket people of Siberia now, but did at one point range much further.  There is one sentence recorded by the Chinese that has been analyzed by different scholars as variously Turkic or Yenisseian.

And finally there are theories that Hunnic was an isolate, unrelated to any other language.  So what it comes down to is that in the end, we don't really know.

TL;DR Hungarian is not related to Hunnic.  What was Hunnic?  Your guess was as good as mine.

[JustHereForFood]

On 6/19/2022 at 6:56 PM, Lugal said:

Hungarian is of the Uralic family, specifically the Ugric branch.  Its closest relatives are east of the Ural mountains.  The Magyars (Hungarians) migrated from there about a thousand years ago.

Correct. Hungarian, along with Finnish and Estonian are not even among Indoeuropean languages, which is a group that contains most European languages (which mostly fall into  Germanic, Slavic or Romance language groups).

[Terrafamilia]

Starting at the 1 minute mark, Gorr, the God Butcher, says, “The only ones who gods care about is themselves.”

I take it that English is not his native language.

[Zella]

38 minutes ago, Terrafamilia said:

Starting at the 1 minute mark, Gorr, the God Butcher, says, “The only ones who gods care about is themselves.”

I take it that English is not his native language.

To be perfectly honest, I've heard much worse English from people whose native language is English. Having it as a native tongue is hardly a guarantee for good grammar. 

[stewedsquash]

On 6/18/2022 at 6:59 PM, legaleagle53 said:

 (as in "Wake me up before you go.").

I can never hear anything but 

Wake me up! before you go go 

Cause I’m not planning on going solo

Along with the standard dork dance I do whenever I hear that. My sons hated me in public. My shoulders are bomping to the beat as I type and I will now have to go listen to the whole thing to get it out of my system. My husband and sons would know what would happen if they asked me to wake them up before I left.

Jitterbug!
Jitterbug!

Edited June 25, 2022 by stewedsquash
With

[shapeshifter]

There’s chilly, chili, and Chile. 
Wrong one:

And since Weed is capitalized, it seems to reference Weed, California, which looks a lot like the background in this image.
This isn’t a real sign, is it?  

[SVNBob]

14 minutes ago, shapeshifter said:

There’s chilly, chili, and Chile. 
Wrong one:

And since Weed is capitalized, it seems to reference Weed, California, which looks a lot like the background in this image.
This isn’t a real sign, is it?  

Definitely not.  I can tell by the pixels.

Someone badly photoshopped (probably not even that program...more like MS Paint) their text onto this real royalty-free stock image: