by Jeff Deck
On a chill and dank early morning in Silver Spring, Maryland, a lone figure stalked through a parking lot and up the walk to a girl’s apartment. The wind gusted again, and he braced himself against the frigid splatter of rain as he made his quiet way to the door, hoping through an alcohol-induced haze that he’d come to the right place. The first rap-tap-tapping went unheard, so after a short pause the visitor banged louder.
Benjamin D. Herson winced at the cold as he opened the door, his short, slight frame nearly nude. He wore only a scraggly beard and a pair of boxers, neither of which proved sufficient protection against the onslaught.
“Sorry,” I whispered, “to come back so late. We decided—”
“Shhh! It’s nearly four a.m.! Get in here!” he whispered harshly, and hauled me inside. I had fortunately already unrolled my sleeping bag before I left to hang out with some D.C. friends from the old Rocks & Minerals days, so I was able to feel my way into it in the darkness. I’d overdone the booze a bit in an effort to burn off the stresses of my initial few days of typo hunting. Benjamin and his girlfriend, Jenny, had the heat cranked up in her tiny efficiency, and I felt glad but confused. My watch had 2:40 a.m. Pretty late to return from an outing, but still not quite 4:00 a.m. Then I recalled today’s date, and tetrominoes in my addled brain snicked together as I glanced at the glowing red numbers next to Jenny’s bed: 3:40. No wonder Benjamin had been about ready to spring forward for my throat.
I heard the thump of my head falling back against the sleeping-bag pillow, and then it was time to get up already, Benjamin informing me that I’d slept plenty. Through bleary eyes I gazed up at my new sidekick. This time he was fully dressed, sporting one of his trademark rock-band T-shirts. An old, battered Dartmouth hat perched on his head. Pretty much as I remembered him from our days as roommates. He bobbed up and down, impatient for action.
Today the proverbial rubber would meet the road. I’d have no more excuses for tepid typo-snaring. After departing from Boston, I’d meekly hunted alone in New York and Jersey. Only in Philadelphia did I have company, a college friend who also kindly hosted me. So far, the results had not been promising. Often I couldn’t summon the nerve to approach proprietors about the errors in their midst, and stealth corrections had occasionally proved more difficult than I’d expected. Would I be emboldened by the presence of Benjamin, my comrade on late-night walks and adventures of varying significance in years past? Benjamin suggested that we begin with a late breakfast in Rockville, where we used to share an apartment, giving me hope that familiar surroundings would also help to smoothen our road.
“The Silver Diner’s in the same shopping plaza as another Filene’s Basement,” he said. “Jenny and I were thinking that those signs you found in Boston might have been sent from corporate. If we find the same signs in this one, we’ll know.” I started to sit up. “I mean, it’d be a cool mystery to solve, assuming you’re still doing this typo thing or whatever today.” My elbow on the sleeping bag slipped out from under me. “Do you need another hour to sleep?”
“No! No …” I struggled to pull myself up and get moving. I had to write the blog entry that I hadn’t gotten to last night. That might distract me from the profound unease that Benjamin’s words had provoked. Had he implied there might be days off on this quest? Or, worse yet, did he not understand that this “typo thing” of mine served as the foundation for the whole quest? I might stay in the same place two nights in a row and thus take a day off from driving, but never would there be justification for forsaking, even for a single day, the primary, sacred duty undergirding my entire journey. Had I somehow left this unclear to Benjamin? I needed to know now, but I feared the answer.
Last night’s typo yield had been meager. Storms had harried me all the way from Philly, making for a stressful drive, so I’d let my desire to kick back for an evening trump the typo hunting. Dining with my friends, I’d found three different spellings of raspberry (none of them correct) on the same menu, but nothing beyond that. What if Benjamin had fully understood the mission but, upon observing how casually I went about it, figured the terms were somehow negotiable? As I worked on the blog, my thoughts drifted back to when I’d first invited him along. I’d never explicitly said he’d be typo hunting with me every day, had I? I should have set the tone immediately yesterday when I came out of my car to meet him, should have shouted something like “Prepare yourself for transpositions!”
By the time the three of us made it to breakfast at the retro-style diner on Rockville Pike, they were serving lunch, but the wait promised to be short. “How many?” the host queried.
“Three,” Benjamin answered.
Three people walked in right behind us, and the man asked, “Are they with you, too?”
“No, we’re only this three.”
Benjamin’s plan had been to get a good meal in and then typo-hunt; however, my typo-sensitivity has no off-switch. Ahh, the chalkboard, its transience inviting typos to breed like larvae in old provisions. Sure enough, their dessert special left something to be desired, namely the second d in pudding. Glorious! I’d found one already, and I could demonstrate to Benjamin both how serious I was about my mission and how easily—
“Dude, I got one!” Benjamin whispered in my ear.
While I’d drifted over to my target, Benjamin had carefully examined the very first piece of text he’d encountered, a sign I’d walked past on my way to the chalkboard. No longer would I need to show him how distressingly common these reeking flotsam were in the tidal flats of our language: he’d just reeled in his first error.
Adding to the serendipity of our simultaneous find, Benjamin’s first collar turned out to be a double offender. The announcement listed the rotating events of a weekly local program for kids. We saw that the first event night of each month had its own problem. First they’d have “a Coloring Contests” and later they’d be “making Rocket Ship.” They’d put the article in for the plural and left it out for the singular! (The sign also evinced a consistent disdain for commas, but hey, let’s not be picky, right?)
I grabbed photographic proof for the blog as the line moved forward. We had to make this correction thing happen in a jiff. There wasn’t a lot of extra room, and surely our ministrations would call attention to ourselves if we gummed up the queue. I lent Benjamin a black pen and a draught of elixir. “We’re surrounded by typos,” he whispered to Jenny as the line moved again.
Guessing that each child would be getting his or her own Rocket Ship to take home, Benjamin didn’t hesitate to add in the s to eliminate the second error, but the potential coloring contest configurations made the resolution of the other more questionable. Sure, they might have a single contest, but kids who wanted to color could easily color through pages upon pages. There could very well be a second contest, and a third, later in the evening. Or maybe they had separate contest categories: most creative, best use of color, most realistic, most surrealistic, best evocation of the Old Masters. He could be overthinking it, but only one version could be true; they could have either “a Coloring Contest” or “Coloring Contests.” And, as is writ in the Book of the League, what profits a man if he gain a typo correction but lose the true meaning of the words? This was an object lesson in how typos foster chaos and confusion. He’d need to know more to complete his first correction, but how?
Meanwhile, I asked the host if I could add an extra d to the chalkboard. Before he could rebuff me, I produced my little cylindrical trump with a flourish. “I have a piece of chalk right here.” A pair of teenage girls, waiting in front of us, burst into hysterical giggling. While field orthography is a serious matter, I can understand their reaction. Quelle coincidence, a man spotting an error and happening to have on him the proper instrument for its destruction. The host allowed me to proceed as the tittering teenagers were shown to their table, peeking back over their shoulders. As I inserted the d, I realized how smoothly and unconsciously I had spoken up to the host, my former hesitations and inhibitions all
but forgotten. Just having a friend nearby had helped me find my voice.
“What should I do about the first one?” Benjamin asked us.
“Three?” said the host. Three typos, yes, but also the size of our party. I’d completed my chalk-work none too soon.
Like a mongrel latching onto ankles, Benjamin had taken various pursuits between his teeth over the years: religion, politics, slam poetry. I watched carefully to see if he’d show the same tenacity in typo affairs, considering all those other causes already lodged in his bicuspids. How many legs could conceivably fit into one mouth? As I pondered this, Benjamin queried the young man escorting us to our table about the notice out front, with uncharacteristic subtlety. “I saw that you have a Kids’ Night here. One night they have a coloring contest? Or is it a series of contests, like for most original, most realistic …”
While gesturing us into our booth and handing out menus, the man replied that, to his knowledge, the night in question revolved around a single coloring contest. Benjamin and Jenny huddled together in a conspiratorial manner. I wondered if he’d really attempt this daring super-spy stealth correction or if, perhaps, the novelty of his first typo correction would fade at the sight of a stack of pancakes. I still hadn’t fully decided on my rules of engagement: when to ask permission, and so forth. I seemed to be leaning toward stealth corrections in minor cases when it didn’t seem worth troubling anyone, or there was no one around to trouble. I never really set specific guidelines for myself. And I might have already broken a minor rule; I’d made a correction at an eatery before I’d been served my food. I didn’t think I had to worry about the diner staff concealing sputum in my meal, though—nobody had taken offense at my pudding correction.
Benjamin chuckled and pointed at our server’s name tag. Now that I’d gotten him to look out for typos, my former roommate had become hyper-aware of all written words to cross his path. Thus, being served by a man named Victor Hugo was the height of hilarity. In the spirit of our friend’s namesake, I decided to go with the caramel French toast.
Before our drinks arrived, the man who’d seated us returned. He’d taken Benjamin’s inquiry at face value, thinking he must have a son or cousin or some other eligible urchin in his life, so he now dropped off some literature on the weekly Kids’ Night. Or Kid’s Night. Kids Night? Uh-oh. What a magnet for error my companion had turned out to be! So soon after Benjamin had spotted one typo, he’d now been handed another. Every possible rendition of Kids’ had been attempted somewhere on the flyer. Due to someone’s lack of, shall we say, apostrophic confidence, they’d decided to try putting the apostrophe before the s here, and after the s there, and over in that corner we can try it without one. I.e., the kind of approach to punctuation one might expect from that notable pair of flip-flops back home, John Kerry and Mitt Romney.
We weren’t sure, though, which rendition we ourselves would vote for. The more we talked it over, the muddier the question became. They offered a Kid’s Party Package: a single package deal for a singular kid’s birthday party. Or should it be Kids’ Party because there would be plural kids attending? Then again, it could be Kid’s Party, using the archetypal Kid to stand for all kids. Like Mother’s Day, which referred not to a day for all mothers (Mothers’ Day) but the day that you, Vic Hugo, had best scrounge up a carnation or two for your own mother.
We can argue over the logic, but the U.S. lacks an overarching authority or consensus on generic possessives.* So the Mother’s Day argument makes sense in isolation, but the government yanked the apostrophe out of Veterans Day. Let’s not get started with Presidents’ Day … Presidents Day? President’s Day?
I have a confession to make. I don’t care whether you go with Kid’s or Kids’, Presidents or President’s. There isn’t some apostrophe god reclining upon an ancient, pitted throne, clutching one single answer to the conundrum. What’s more essential is that you make a decision and stick with it. Consistency is the key, and unfortunately also the area in which so much signage fails. Some days later, in Charleston, we’d see a store announcing “Phillip’s Shoes” on its awning, while “Phillips Shoes” adorned the building itself. You can’t even make up your mind about the name of your store? Isn’t that kind of an important decision? The Filene’s Basement problems we’d be investigating further after brunch were another telling example of apostrophe confusion. “Mens’ boxed ties” was an easy one to make, arising from someone knowing a basic grammatical rule (plural apostrophes go after the s) that happened to be broken in this particular case (since men is already a plural noun, there’s no need to distinguish between the singular and plural. It’s man’s and men’s). But then another sign had decided to skip the apostrophe altogether, resulting in the MENS department.
Your teachers were right about the apostrophe always standing in for a missing letter or letters. A millennium ago, instead of using an apostrophe and an s for possessives, English used a genitive case that added the suffix–es to the possessing noun (e.g., Benjamines beard, kides night). Within a couple hundred years, that practice fell into disfavor as English became the preserve of the lower classes, after English-speakers got stomped on by French-speaking Normans from across the narrow sea. But we’ll hold off on the edu-tastic voyage through history. Suffice it to say that in the case of possessives, the apostrophe stands for that lost e, from a grammatical convention that no longer exists.
Further maligning the logic of apostrophes is the fact that the possessive nouns often sound the same as the plural noun. Spoken language came on the scene long, long before the written symbols that corresponded to it; the oral form of language often guides the written. In the case of possessive apostrophes and plurals, in so many cases verbally indistinguishable, the written distinction becomes increasingly confused for a growing segment of the population.
We enjoyed an incredibly good meal, I treated, and we departed, but not before Benjamin made one last change. Thanks to his inquiry, we now knew that a single coloring contest took place. I handed him the elixir and got my camera ready, and we rolled out according to plan, Benjamin leading our procession and pausing, as Jenny and I passed slowly between him and any probing eyes. He struck with a quick splash of the elixir and took Jenny’s arm, leaving me to flash a picture and scurry out the double doors after them.
We triumphant three strode out into the parking lot, cool as cantaloupes. My first successful venture with my new typo-hunting ally Benjamin. I felt suave and in control, action-movie cool, except that I couldn’t figure out how to walk in slow motion.
Filene’s Basement awaited across the parking lot, and there all my illusions of urbanity shattered. We seemed underdressed for the store. Our T-shirts and jeans stood out against the garb of customers and employees alike. The man who approached us noticed it, judging by the downward turn of his mouth, but Benjamin snapped, “Your boxed ties, please?” I realized the object of my objection occurred in a word that, bad punctuation aside, was also completely unnecessary. It’s not as if there were a separate station for women’s boxed ties.
The well-dressed employee escorted us down an aisle to a fixture that looked familiar. Benjamin gave our thanks with a sharp nod, letting the man know that his assistance was no longer required. Benjamin’s whole manner seemed to suggest that he was often, in fact, overdressed for such a store, but that this was merely his Sunday off and no one had better question it. For the first time it occurred to me what an asset it was to have a retail employee on my side. He’d seen all the customer types often enough that he could mask himself with any attitude to match the moment, and so much of the typo-finding realm would overlap with his familiar turf. Benjamin was striding into the echoing ivory halls of typo-hunting with gusto. I took it as a promising omen for this leg of the trip.
“Précisement,” Jenny declared, channeling Hercule Poirot as she gestured toward the offending sign. She and Benjamin cuddled together, delighted at how they’d sleuthed the cause of one of my earliest finds. Not merely the same err
or, but the same sign. These errors had been run off en masse. I twisted around to check for another problem, sighted it, and this time snapped better photos of what I’d failed to adequately record a few hundred miles north. MENS’ BOXED TIES. And above us, MENS CONTEMPORARY.
Adding to my sense of déjà vu, Benjamin said, “Since men is already plural, the s can only declare that it’s possessive; therefore an apostrophe is strikingly absent.”
Declare? Therefore? Strikingly? I wondered how much longer he’d be wearing his snootier-than-thou persona, as much as I’d appreciated it. “See, dude,” he said, and I sighed with relief that I wouldn’t have to poke him in the coconut after all, “there’s no use trying to correct this apostrophe here, and it wouldn’t have helped to confront anyone in Boston either.”
I stood shocked. They had casually removed the dark stain of cowardice from my first day’s hunt and washed it clean so that, in hindsight, my deeds shone pure, giving off an aura of discretion. Jenny drove the point home: “We’d have to call their corporate office. See, the employees could even get in trouble for taking signs down or fixing a mistake if their district manager failed to understand. Their merch people are supposed to put up the signs they’re told to, no questions asked.”
Though Benjamin and I resolved to call the Filene’s Basement corporate headquarters at the close of the trip, we never got the chance to do so, thanks to the interference of certain dire events. As it turns out, our efforts would not have been that productive in the long run anyway—as of this writing, the chain has been sold to a liquidator and has filed for bankruptcy, another victim of hard economic times. What was truly important about that day’s adventures was that I had gained a valuable ally in the fight for better spelling and grammar.
