Interesting story, which struck a chord with me, having lived a short bit of my childhood in Schenectady on the Erie Canal.

 

 Not having seen the actual signage, it was unclear to me from the news article whether the spelling Eire was an early historic spelling or one concocted by someone today wanting to point to contributions of the Irish.  I also couldn’t tell if the “spoked like a dock worker” was part of a quote from someone who was a dock worker (Fingy obviously wouldn’t have spoken about himself in third person), was part of a longer section written in dockworkers speech patterns that was set off from the main text, or just ‘dropped in’ to the text by the signage writer.

 

The use of earlier ways of speaking can be very effective in interpretation, but it seems to me that it has to be clear to the reader or listener that what they are hearing or reading are the actual words of a person or typical of a person or group of people.  As presented here, it looks as if whoever wrote the signage may have taken a good principle but implemented it poorly and unevenly.   

 

Last but not least, if this signage is confusing and appears incorrect to we who know the intent of this interpretive method, it can’t look like anything other than flat out spelling errors to the uninitiated, and some poor kid will get marked down in school for spelling Erie wrong because he thinks Eire is really the correct way to spell it having assumed the sign to be authoritative.  

 

But maybe if we saw the entire interpretive sign, we’d support the signage writer (?). 

 

 

Lucy Sperlin

Butte County Historical Society

Oroville, CA