After all that, I just have to add my own "funny sign" story. Unlike all of the above, it's not the result of a juncture of terms, but of bad glue on large plastic letters.

A few miles away from our home, out on Route 1, there is one of those self-storage places. It's been there since the middle eighties, when it was one of the first such establishments in the area, if not the first. Because it was one of the local pioneers of the business, it had a big sign made up of two-foot-tall white plastic letters glued to a side wall facing the highway intended to explain what it was all about, and reading simply "PUBLIC SELF STORAGE".

Well, a few years after it opened, some of those letters fell off the wall and were never replaced. And for several years after that, the building proudly proclaimed that it was the site for "PUBIC ELF RAGE".

We'd drive by it and every time say something along the lines of "he's still raging!"

Oddly, no other letters ever fell off for rest of that sign's life (it was taken down and replaced outright when the place changed hands and brands). So I've always wondered if it hadn't been an intentional prank by someone...

-- Bob
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.