Today as I was leaving the library I noticed one of the simple little yellow “Wet Floor” signs. The strange thing about this one, was that it appeared that some of our crack janitorial staff added a message in magic marker to both sides of the sign…
It appears someone else had the same question I had… “Remob?”
Maybe they’re Russian, where the B would have a V sound?
Clearly the person that wrote that was of Hispanic origin. There is a tendency to reverse the “B” and “V” sounds, as any actor studying accents will tell you. Very much like the Japanese proclivity to reverse the “R” and “L” sounds. I used to do business with a Japanese-American fellow named Lander Watanabe. I always thought his name was unusual, until I realized much later that when his Japanese immigrant parents were telling hospital personnel what name to put on his birth certificate, whomever wrote it down didn’t understand that they were saying “Randall.”