The context is important

With the pandemic still restricting our lives, we haven't driven out of town a lot. But we did go out today to do some shopping. On the road, I saw one of those flashing road signs that said, "Others wear a mask." Well, that sounded like a bad thing to tell people. Especially on an official state highway sign. It seems like they are saying we don't need to worry about wearing a face mask because other people will be wearing their masks and that will protect us.

Of course, I jumped the gun. There is only so much space on those signs and it takes more than one screen full to get the entire message across. So, they split the message up into phrases that will fit on one screen and then show another screen of text after a few seconds.

As we drove by the sign, it switched to the other screen which read, "PROTECT YOURSELF AND" It's important to realize that all the characters on the sign are upper case and there is no punctuation. But in my head, I saw the first phrase, "OTHERS WEAR A MASK," as "Others" with this capitalization and the first word in the sentence. When the second screen appeared, "PROTECT YOURSELF AND", I realized the entire sentences was supposed to be, "Protect yourself and others. Wear a mask."

It would be nice if highway signs could display mixed case and punctuation. It would also be nice if the entire message could be displayed at once. How many accidents are caused as drivers divert their attention from the road to watch the sign until all the pieces of a message are displayed? Then again, I could leave the reading and interpretation of flashing highway signs to my passengers. I will also hold off judging highway sign messages until I know the whole story.