I posted about this on Apostrophe Catastrophes today. Let me know if the credit is adequate.
http://www.apostrophecatastrop...

Would've been simpler if it was a streetcar, not a bus.

Stephen Fry would like to have a word with you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY&feature=player_embedded

One of the painted Mars Bar signs above the bar says "Mar's Bar"

Why is this posted under "food?"

Outsourcing? Just sayin'.

(Seriously - Brooklyn sign shops with ESL owners make these sort of errors all the damn time. I mean, even signs that obviously involved a lot of effort still make it out of the workshop with at least one glaring typo. Don't even ask about the signs that are obviously crap from 100 yards away.)

I don't think it's something necessarily related to ESL sign makers either. I'm not sure if this is true in the US, but certainly in the UK they use the phrase "the grocer's apostrophe" to refer to the common mistakes found at fruit & veg stores that advertise "potatoe's and tomatoe's" etc etc.

Ha! Know the britcom "Open All Hours"? One episode Arkwright (shop-owner & master salesman) intentionally misspells a couple of words painted on the window (advertising specials) just to lure would-be know-it-alls into the shop who come in to point out the errors (and of course they wind up leaving with an arm-full of goods.)

You're right about the apostrophes natch, but over here were talking about (real example!) a newsstand getting a new and otherwise splendid-looking awning, proclaiming in fancy two-foot-high block letters that they sell "INTERNATIONAL NEW'S". They scraped off the apostrophe afterward, but the damage was done. The blank spot just glares at you when you pass it.

I would argue the second sentence is as bad, as it is incomplete. Should be ", and we mean it."

But even then it still sucks. Fuck the MTA.

(The incomplete second sentence is on purpose)

Although I know that "its" is proper there, I've never fully grasped the reasoning behind the omission of apostrophes for certain possessive pronouns. Were this sentence "The bus has the bus's own lane," bus would have an apostrophe. Yet when "it" stands in as the pronoun for "bus," it doesn't. It seems to me that it should -- even though I know that "it's" there is as incorrect as "their's" or "our's" or "who'se" would be.

Funny language we speak, isn't it.

Damn y'all, go easy on Jen.

Throwing stones in a glass house is one of those special life lessons that teaches itself. Let's just let nature take its course on this one.

=)

Grammatical error? The whole poster is a disaster. Some high priced consultant was paid a lot of money to come up with this dreck. Fuck the MTA...

These first went up at the end of September, but it seems many of them are now being replaced with corrected versions: http://www.nyc-grid.com/snippets/2010/10/13/the-mta-learned-how-to-use-apostrophes.html

Ah, the classics.

Honestly though, this is commonplace now. Next time you're waiting for a train, just try to find a poster on the platform that doesn't have improper punctuation.

The MTA may mean it, but they're not the ones responsible for keeping the bus lane free of cars. Also the grammatical error doesn't surprise me in the slightest, most people wouldn't know proper punctuation if it bit them on the ass.

How ironic that YOUR website is talking about typos. Give me a break.

I was thinking the same thing! Not in a mean way. In a funny ha ha way

Gothamist: your typo authority!