One missing letter made for one very awkward message.
Officials in Canada found themselves in an embarrassing bind after a typo appeared on a run of French-language signs promoting a “public” streets initiative — only for the wording to accidentally refer to “pubic squares.”
The posters were intended to say “public place” in French, but the letter “L” was left out of “publiques,” the French word for “public.”
The mistake left numerous signs around Ottawa displaying an unintentionally indecent phrase.
Residents in Ottawa’s French-speaking community, which makes up a significant share of the city, quickly spotted the uncomfortable error.
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“I thought, ‘Ooooh, this is bad in general,’” Councillor Stéphanie Plante, a member of the city’s French language services committee, told CBC.
The signage was part of a campaign by the business improvement area for Centretown, an Ottawa neighborhood, aimed at encouraging people to make greater use of local streets on foot.
The English versions of the campaign signs, which promoted the open-streets program as “uncommon spaces,” were produced correctly.
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.
