The current paper aims to explore the issues of creative linguistic landscape on the social media platform, with a particular focus on the creative appropriation of offline linguistic landscapes used for mockery. To address this issue, this paper presents a case study of a blog post that displays ludic sign plays that mock universities. Drawing on the principles of Geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) and the framework of ‘ambient affiliation’ (Zappavigna, 2018), this study investigates how playful mockery of universities is realized through the creative appropriation of linguistic landscapes originally found offline and how such mockery is perceived by online audience in their comments. The findings show that the creative appropriation of offline landscapes is typically realized via three strategies—resemiotization, emplacement, and homonym. With respect to commenters’ perceptions, the comments following the post indicate a consistent reaction towards the mockery presented in the post. While some defer to the “mockery” bond with laughter-like expressions to show their amusement, others promote the “mockery” bond by sharing similar cases with visual reminders to engage ambient readers in the ironic practice. By exploring a special phenomenon of appropriation of linguistic landscapes on social media platforms, this study extends the existing research on the linguistic landscape by situating it in a digital context.

Key words: creative appropriation, linguistic landscape, humorous mockery, ambient affiliation, social media