ANTITUSSIVE

By ANTHONY DePALMA NYT January 4, 2005

This may be the age of Internet pop-ups and text-message marketing, but lots of businesses - especially small businesses - still do most of their advertising with old-fashioned low-tech signs. And just as the eyes are said to be windows to the soul, these storefront signs - which often come with fractured grammar and mysterious spelling - can be portals on a great city that is regenerating itself with a flood of new immigrants.

The signs are there to lure customers, of course, but they can do much more. Four out of 10 current New Yorkers were born in a foreign country, more than at any other time since the 1920's, and many have gone immediately into business. Their signs can form a style all their own, and style, as E. B. White, a passionate New Yorker at heart, once observed, is sometimes nothing but "sheer luck, like getting across the street."

With such luck, the errors in usage add unintended meaning, like the East Side pizzeria that for a long time listed "1 litter" bottles of soda on its menu. So many one-liter bottles end up as litter that such a change might be appropriate.

Signs, like the one announcing the imminent closing of a dry-cleaning shop on West 42nd Street, can be read as existential meditations on time. "Last Day of Opening December 23," read the sign in the shop's front window. While the wording did not obscure the sign's message, it did bring to mind Churchill's famous formulation about World War II, and the certain way of placing an event in time to truly understand its significance: "Now this is not the closing," a Churchillian shop owner might well have said. "It is not even the beginning of the closing. But it is, perhaps, the end of the opening." To these Asian shop owners, a decade of taking out spots on 42nd Street was just a prolonged opening, and they will start over again on another city street.

Elyse B. Rudolph, executive director of the Literacy Assistance Center, a group that helps newcomers learn English, says that the immigrants flooding into the city today are "ambitious, smart and wonderful" but that many are not literate in either English or their native language. That means they "do not come with an understanding of the structure of a language," she said.

In addition, Ms. Rudolph said, many follow the old immigrant practice of giving their sign business to their own kind. This helps the immigrants get a toehold in New York but the signs suffer, since both the printer and the customer may not know good English from bad.

Such nearsighted oversight was undoubtedly responsible for the sign on the side of a pushcart that was parked for a long time on the corner of 38th Street and Fifth Avenue. The very busy owner ran several grills at once, with a lot of chopping, slapping and swishing. He spoke almost no English beyond the items on the extensive menu printed on the side of his cart. The top section listed Seafood, followed by a category noted as Beef Food and then, logically, another section called Chicken Food.

English words are difficult for foreigners to spell. But part of what seems to be happening in New York City today is an overlapping of ethnic groups that confounds attempts at proper orthography. With Mexicans working in pizzerias and Afghans pushing hot dog carts, even ethnic words get misspelled.

So just about any Italian dish with more than two syllables presents difficulties, and words in which consonants run in pairs, like mozzarella, or run up against unruly vowels, like parmigiana, are never spelled the same way twice. One pizzeria on 41st Street has spaguetti with clam sause, and a lunch cart on Lexington Avenue and 46th Street helps out-of-towners by spelling knish "kanish."

"People tell me it's wrong and I told my brother-in-law, who is the owner, but he doesn't want to change it," said Wael Ahmed, 39, an Egyptian immigrant who works at the stand with kanish and chees steak on the menu. "Sometimes people on the street also tell me it's wrong, but I tell them it doesn't matter because we don't sell knish anymore."

But spelling mistakes are nothing compared to the double-entendres that have found their way onto the streets of the city. And because advanced printing technology makes plastic and canvas printing cheap enough for immigrant shopkeepers to afford, the mysteries endure.

Even when stores change hands, and signs are repainted, some messages live on. So whole generations of New Yorkers will be left to ponder the real meaning of the sign over the entrance to the Park Slope Grocery + Convinient store on Fourth Avenue and 17th Street in Brooklyn. The store's new owners no longer sell beepers (Who does?), but still visible beneath the letters spelling out Smoke Shop is the word Beerpers, an intriguing pentimento that still conjures images of boozy afternoons at the ballpark with the beer man just a beep away.

Technology also makes possible mass-production knockoffs of popular products, like movie DVD's. The Pakistani immigrant hovering over dozens of movies laid out on a Manhattan sidewalk obviously didn't realize that the title of the 1992 Al Pacino film he was selling was "Scent of a Woman," not "Scant of a Woman," though that alternative title might have expressed the loneliness of being thousands of miles from home.

Money, of course, is often the object of obsession, and immigrants recognize the words dollar, dough, buck or moola long before they can string together an English sentence. The dollar becomes their frame of reference in some ways, although at first it may be only in terms of what it means at the foreign exchange booth. How else to explain the sign posted on the front door of a busy Chinese restaurant on 45th Street, just off Avenue of the Americas, that warns coin seekers looking for change without spending a dime: "Sorry! We do not have any quarter for exchange."

The same passion for the dollar may explain why so many bargain stores run by immigrants fix on that magical figure. There are 99-cent stores in every immigrant neighborhood. But each has its own accent. Inspired by its surroundings, one such store near the diamond district in Midtown Manhattan is improbably called 99 cent Dreams. One in a Chinatown basement is called 99 cent or plus. Some critics see the fractured English on these signs as an attack on the very things that hold society together. Others see them as fresh reminders that the city is renewing itself.

But then there are those who see in the signs nothing less than poetry, which itself has had many different meanings, though no one hit closer to the bull's-eye, it could be argued, than the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who believed poetry was simply "the best words in their best order."

And in such order, perhaps, a true reflection of what is important in life. It's hard to come to any other conclusion when looking at the store window on Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street, just a few hundred feet west of the office of one of the city's largest newspapers. There, in bright neon colors, is a stark reminder of priorities, a neon Post-it note to those who work at that newspaper to not take themselves too seriously.

Candy is the first item on the list of four essentials.

Left to right, Soda is next.

Then Beer.

And last, News.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 7:24 AM