These are the funniest signage fails etched in San Francisco concrete

CECELIA — You're breaking my heart. Location: Cecilia Avenue and 16th Avenue CECELIA — You're breaking my heart. Location: Cecilia Avenue and 16th Avenue Photo: Thomas Rogers/Flickr Photo: Thomas Rogers/Flickr Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close These are the funniest signage fails etched in San Francisco concrete 1 / 17 Back to Gallery

If you walk the streets of San Francisco regularly, you're bound to see them.

Just look down at your feet while approaching an intersection. Chances are, before too long you'll spot a street name stamped in the concrete that doesn't look right.

The spelling is off. Or maybe a letter is missing. Or, most commonly, the letters are transposed.

Instead of HEARST ST, you read HEARTS ST. BRAYNT instead of BRYANT. TYALOR where you should be seeing TAYLOR.

There are scores of these sidewalk signage boo-boos, which have inspired a small cadre of typo hunters. Web galleries documenting construction crew carelessness have sprung up in their wake.

One of the better known is the Flickr site of Thomas Rogers.

Construction workers — third-party contractors hired by the city's Department of Public Works — often transpose letters because the metal stamps (one for each letter) must be arranged in reverse order and orientation. The stamps are then flipped over and set in wet concrete. It's easy to misalign letters.

But that doesn't excuse the more blatant spelling or grammar errors. Did they think we wouldn't notice something was missing in MISSON? Or that 41TH (Forty-firth) wasn't a real word?

Once engraved in cement, it costs $300 to fix a typo, which explains why the city is not exactly champing at the bit to correct concrete mistakes, at least not until the whole intersection has to be repaved.

Besides, what else would we have to laugh at as we're waiting to cross the street?

To see some of the funniest sidewalk signage fails, click on the above slideshow.