For me it is nowadays a rare treat to find a new type of dog sign! This note was taped in the glass window of a business in downtown Helsinki. The pictorial component of this sign is pretty typical with our generic collared terrier being forbidden, but the text! "No dog fouling".
The foundational works of the field of dog sign semiotics are Laihonen and Laihonen & Halonen. In the latter the authors describe three categories of dog signs that naturally arose in their study of dog signs in the Finnish city of Jyväskylä:
- '[dogs] being restricted',
- 'dogs are not part of nature', and
- 'dogs as potentially impure'.
Here the 'potentially impure' category is the one that I've spent most time analyzing myself. But never I have seen the textual component of a dog sign to be so prominently signaling this type of content. Not only does the sign use the unusual and quite vivid term of fouling, but it goes on to remind that it is an offense to not curb after your dog. The context doesn't quite narrow the interpretation down to either 'insulting' or 'illegal', but I feel that the word is used to imply both at the same time.
Now, admittedly, this might just be a bad translation1. But to me this feels like Shakespeare wrote this sign after having stepped in dog shit.
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This interpretation might be supported as we note that the sign vessel here is a simple A4 piece of paper where the sign has been printed in black and white, probably with a basic home printer. My eye is not quite good enough to capture fonts at a glance, but the font might also be one of the standard ones you get e.g. in Word. ↩