Maybe, just maybe, the sign could have stayed up.
A sign in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport got a lot of attention the past couple of days for touting "wold class" (instead of world class).
But the airport could have spun the typo in its favor.
Maybe the sign referred to the "Lord of the Rings" movies. The Wold was the northernmost and least populated part of Rohan, a grassy upland plain lying between Fangorn Forest and the Anduin, bordered to the north by the Limlight.
Maybe it referred to Stone Mountain. Wold is an Old English term for a forest or an area of woodland on high ground.
Maybe it was a reference to Harry Chapin's song "W-O-L-D," about a DJ who travels the country looking for happiness. People from all over the world travel through Hartsfield-Jackson. Not familiar with the song? See it here.
With such an international population each day, maybe the sign referred to the World Loanword Database (WOLD), which, according to its website, "provides vocabularies (mini-dictionaries of about 1000-2000 entries) of 41 languages from around the world, with comprehensive information about the loanword status of each word. It allows users to find loanwords, source words and donor languages in each of the 41 languages, but also makes it easy to compare loanwords across languages."
Or maybe it's an homage to Albus Dumbledore. Hogwarts' headmaster presumably lived his early days in Mould-on-the-Wold in England.
Airport officials took the sign down, opting to go with the more traditional "world class" instead.
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