“Explores the visual manifestations of collegiate fun in a Midwestern college town where house signs on off-campus residences are a focal point of college culture, reproducing consequential categories of gender, sexuality, race, and faith in a medium students say is benign.”

“LaDousa makes excellent use of the formal interviews collected by his students to show that house signs are indeed a serious subject. In doing so he has provided us with a valuable text for introducing students to the field of linguistic anthropology and the process of collecting and analyzing data about textual practices in everyday life.May 2013”
 — Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

“LaDousa presents weighty matters with intelligence and nuance, and yet always clearly, and with a wealth of data that generates a multitude of 'aha' moments.”
 — James Collins, University at Albany, SUNY

“A very lively read, one of those rare books that brings a sophisticated interpretive perspective together with ethnographic materials that are engaging, thought-provoking, and, for many of us and especially for our students, both experience-near and surprising. Good to read and think with, and likely to become, quite deservedly, a classic for undergraduate teaching.”
 — Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz

“A fascinating, surprising, and intriguing look at pervasive house signs in a Midwestern U.S. college town, this book will delight college students, appeal to those who teach them, and engage those who study them across several disciplines. It is a skillful analysis of contemporary material culture, its playfulness, creativity, and ambiguities. It is also a vivid example of the multiple ways in which people engage with signs (visual or verbal)--from assuming that they have obvious meanings to privileging particular interpretations ,and even to denying that signs have any meaning at all.”
 — Virginia Dominguez, University of Illinois