The Secret Language of Signs

Here is a bit of signage related arcana I stumbled across while looking for an online justification for my preferred use of the word snipes to describe posters wheat-pasted up around town. I use it for both advertisements and posters of the street art variety. It was a term I learned years ago, when I was invited out for a night of sniping with the art-scene feminists, The Guerilla Girls. It seemed at the time (and still) the perfect word to describe these posters that appear so surreptitiously.

My search included strings like “+snipes +advertising” (which got me a lot of links to advertising for movies starring Wesley Snipes) and +snipes +”guerilla marketing” led me to dead ends. Finally the query “+snipes +advertising +poster” led me to this Glossary entitled Lexicon of Terms Commonly Used in Outdoor Advertising brought to us by the fine people at…The Outdoor Advertising Association of the Philippines, naturally. I just love the internet.

Now that I’ve had my verbiage validated by someone in the Philippines, I’ll get back to work on my upcoming post about a curious series of snipes I’ve been seeing on the streets of NYC lately. Stay tuned.

To view a full size image of the Guerilla Girls snipe pictured at left, click here.

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