Canadian street signs promote pubic squares in cringeworthy gaffe: This is bad

That’s an ‘L’ of a difference. Canadian officials got into a hairy situation thanks to an embarrassing typo in a series of French-language signs that were meant to advertise a “public” streets program — but inadvertency promoted “pubic squares.”The posters, which were supposed to read “public place” in French, were printed without the ‘L’ in the word ‘publiques’ – the French word for “public.”The gaffe resulted in scores of signs plastered across Ottawa bearing the indecent message.It wasn’t too long before Ottawa’s Francophones – a decent portion of the city’s population – noticed the cringe-worthy snafu.

“I thought, ‘Ooooh, this is bad in general,’” Councillor Stéphanie Plante, who sits on the city’s French language services committee, told CBC. The posters were part of an effort by the local business improvement area (BIA) of the Ottawa nabe Centretown to encourage pedestrian use of the streets. The English-language versions of the signs, advertising the open-streets program as “uncommon spaces,” were printed without an error.But the troubling translation of the French-language signs quickly overshadowed the program.The signs, which were put up at intersections along the city’s Bank St.early in the weekend, were removed by Sunday morning. The business improvement area’s leader quickly apologized for the mistake, saying that the obscene signs were taken down and new ones without the lewd mistake would be put up soon. “While we embrace the humanity in imperfection here in Centretown, we also take responsibility when mistakes happen,” Sabrina Lemay, executive director of the Centretown BIA, said in an apology, according to CBC....