I saw this at Port Blair airport today, on my way back from an excellent family vacation at Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Language errors on notices and boards are very common and are tracked by countless blogs and humor websites. Since most of these follow typical patterns like spelling mistakes (MISSILE PAAV or anything any IITB Hostel Canteen menu lists) or bad grammar, they are funny but mostly unremarkable. However, I am posting this one here since I have the feeling that this wasn’t so much a result of lack of competence as plain confusion.
On reading it for the first time, I got what it meant to say, and you would too, because my mind was primed by ‘SIX DAYS’, and was expecting information about which day wasn’t included. But, it struck me as slightly weird, so I backtracked, and there it was. When you interpret it literally, you are in a fix. I get a feeling that the person typing the notice was planning to write something like ‘ALL DAYS EXCEPT SATURDAY’, but then thought that a numerical quantifier like ‘SIX’ would emphasize the frequency better, and ended up with this jumble. Alternatively, he might have planned ‘SIX DAYS’, and then realized that he hadn’t mentioned which day the service didn’t run, and added the very idiomatic ‘EXCEPT SATURDAY’ bit at the end, forgetting what he had begun with. Either way, this doesn’t appear to be the result of language ignorance so much as a simple goof-up. That is, it seems to be an issue of performance rather than competence.