A road sign has been placed on a busy road in Gloucestershire with a very obvious spelling mistake on it. The funny part was that it took a fortnight before it was actually reported to anyone and it seems that most people did not even notice the error. The sign is on the A429 near Cirencester and should read ‘Cotswold airport’ but has been printed with the ‘w’ and ‘s’ around the wrong way, thus reading ‘Cotwsold airport’. The error was reported to the Cotswold airport by email, a few weeks after the sign had been up. The manager was astonished to discover the error, as he drove past the sign on a daily basis and had not noticed it himself.
The county council, who erected the sign, were grateful for being told of the error and will organise for it to be corrected. They will ask the manufacturer to put it right at their own cost as the name of the airport had been spelt correctly on the order.
The Cotswold airport changed its name about a year ago from Kemble Airport and so a new road sign was commissioned in order to reflect this name change. No one expected that it would cause such an interesting news item to be formulated.
This just showed how cleaver the brain is in reading words without us having to consciously think about the spelling. It is likely that just the first and last parts of the word were read by the drivers as they went by and they just didn’t even see the error in the middle of the word. It is probably also partly due to the speed that they were going as they went past and how we often ignore information which is not interesting to us and so unless we were really interested in the sign we would just barely glance at it.