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In the village of Fjord, Wisconsin, one weekday in July, a man on a bicycle observed a crudely constructed sign frame planted in the grass near the curb in front of a certain handsome home with a well-kept yard. An all-caps, large-print notice on brightly colored typing paper was secured to the front and back of the sign frame. The notice amounted to an open letter of protest of the presumed inconsideration of a dog owner. The notice included a colorful term that the man on the bicycle found, in its present context, amusing but offensive.
Only the day before, in the same neighborhood, the man on the bicycle had participated in a successful search for a dog who had briefly escaped from a dogsitter. The man on the bicycle therefore realized what the poster of the notice evidently did not: that the “offender” to whom the notice was addressed may not have been someone inconsiderate, may not have been someone likely to repeatedly cause inconvenience to the poster of the notice, but instead someone who had unluckily and briefly lost track of an animal through no fault of his own.
Making several speculations about the identity, character, and intelligence of the person who had posted the notice, the man on the bicycle chuckled at what he considered an irony: that a homeowner would clean up a pile of dog mess and then leave in its place so unpleasantly pungent a proclamation. The two uglinesses, however, were not perfectly equivalent. The man on the bicycle was willing to concede that a homeowner or a passerby encounters no risk of stepping in a vulgar word.
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