A Thing Seen While Walking

A sign on a gate to someone’s backyard, nicely etched into a small piece of painted wood:

RABID DOG’S
KEEP-OUT

Being who I am, my eye is instantly drawn to spelling and grammatical errors, so this one with its pair of problems really leaped out. But for whatever reason, I started to dwell on this particular sign, and three possibilities suggest themselves:

1. The sign-maker is illiterate, and has no business making signs. The owners of the house aren’t terribly literate themselves, so I guess they got what they deserve. (Given the notion that the simplest solution is usually the best, this one has to get high marks.)

2. The sign is in fact correct. If the yard is being called a “keep-out,” which would be unusual but not impossible, and if there is only one dog who effectively owns the yard, then the grammar would be correct: it would in fact be the rabid dog’s keep-out. (This does not seem likely at all, but is my personal favorite alternative.)

3. The sign-maker is a crook who charges by the character. Of the eighteen characters on that sign, two shouldn’t be there but are. So if he’s charging, say, one dollar per character carved, those two extra bucks represent a significant markup in the real price of the work. And if he does that systematically, he’s conning a lot of people out of a lot of cash they don’t need to spend. (This one? More likely than it ought to be.)

The real curiosity here? The fact that my brain is wired in such a way that I will spend this much time pondering bad grammar without ever bothering to wonder--are there really rabid dogs back there? Do they ever jump the fence to maul passing strangers obsessed with grammar? Maybe that’s why the sign is as it is, to lure the grammatically-obsessed close enough that they can be picked off by rabid dog’s!

So yeah, man. Keep-out, please.