Dinning

To strike with confused or clanging sound; to stun with loud and continued noise; to harass with clamor; as, to din the ears with cries.

One of my many silly hobbies is taking photos of public, expensively produced typographical errors, as on awnings, billboard, banners, and so on.

I am not a spelling cop or a person who wastes his energies on peeves. No, the spirit of this little project is to capture capitalism’s soft side, which in my neighborhood would include such factors as the business owner’s lack of English fluency.

One typo in particular that partly inspired me to start collecting more was the word "dinning." I have seen this word in neon signs, on awnings, on enormous banners — always appearing where the word should obviously be "dining."

This one spelling error appears in so many places that I started to think a "dinning room" was some kind of sound chamber — that is, a place in which a din of sound might always be present.

A restaurant in Long Island City has, for years, advertised its "Dinning Room" on an awning over one of its windows. The first time I saw that I thought they had some kind of gimmicky room they called a Dinning Room, and it was a place in which random sounds and freaky light displays played continuously.

But no. That diner, like so many other establishments, simply mis-spelled "dining."