The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  We walked between two giant hotels and onto the cool sand of the beach. The sun sank into a brilliant slumber over the ocean. Mere days ago we’d hung our heads on another beach, one state north, but our mission itself had made progress far beyond geographic measure. I knew now that I could muster the courage to handle whatever orthographic challenge came my way. Perhaps all our recent tribulations had served to lead us to this consecrated moment. I turned to comment on the splendor of the sunset, and saw Benjamin jumping up and down on the sand. Between jumps, he gulped down more water. Something would shift in his internal tracts soon enough. The League, purged of its ill humours, could then commence its true work.

  TYPO TRIP TALLY

  Total found: 25

  Total corrected: 14

  6 | Beneath the Surface

  March 15–16, 2008 (Atlanta, GA)

  Wherein our oblivious yet infinitely amiable Heroes invite contests for which they are ill-equipped, and an unforeseen conversation riddled with deep and ominous subtext precedes a mental maelstrom & literal hailstorm. Soaked through with insight and precipitation, our Chief Arbiter of Grammatical Justice recognizes that, like sewer-dwelling, nunchaku-wielding amphibians, more lurks ’neath the roads our Heroes tread.

  In 1861, Georgia and six other slaveholding states seceded from the Union, protesting the election of Abraham Lincoln, that infernal Northerner who plotted against the expansion of their chattel-based business. Georgia, the railroad hub of the South, ferried supplies to all corners of the newly hatched Confederacy, until the Union shelled the heart of Atlanta. When the war ended, Atlantans rebuilt their city center, creating a vibrant business district around their new train station. Over the next hundred years the city grew over that district, with bridges and viaducts turning the former street level into subterranea. In 1968 the funeral procession of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. clattered directly overhead; the following year, the “city beneath the city” was reopened as Underground Atlanta, a retail and entertainment destination. Its charming old architecture helped the district to flourish as the Bourbon Street of Atlanta, but eventually subway construction and crime shut down Underground Atlanta. The cookfires of vagrants ravaged the old historical sites. In 1989 a revamped, mall-like Underground Atlanta reopened. Three years later, following the acquittal of the L.A. policemen who had beaten Rodney King, rioters smashed up the place. In 1996, Underground Atlanta opened its doors for a third time, now in time for the Atlanta Olympics. In 2008 two white boys wandered into Underground Atlanta, looking for typos.

  We gazed down the little thoroughfare. Having come from the MARTA, Atlanta’s mass transit, I felt that, strangely, we’d reentered the station we’d just left. With the pipes running along the ceiling, this place looked more like the subway than the subway did. A row of clothing stores, interspersed with dollar stores, ran along the wall, and the walkway was broken up with mid-mall kiosks peddling hats, sports jerseys, and your instant photo plastered on mugs or shirts. Light filtered through windows that ran below the ceiling. Perhaps owing to the threatening clouds outside, the lighting in here felt gloomy. Consumers moved along in no hurry, giving the impression that no one came here to find what they needed, but because there wasn’t anywhere to be. Whatever its past glory, Underground Atlanta stood before us as testament to capitalism’s slipperiest slope, junk for people willing to buy junk because it’s there.

  A whiteboard affixed to a metal railing contained some spelling issues. I pointed the sign out to Benjamin, who spotted the bright pink PREGNACY TEST immediately, but needed a second to see, in yellow block letters outlined with a black marker, the transposed vowels of SOUVINER (it’s a tricky word, one we’d see botched again before we reached the Pacific). My Typo Correction Kit, a plastic shopping bag holding the tools of my amending trade, bulged heavy in my coat, though I found myself ill-equipped for our entry into this particular den of errata—I lacked dry-erase markers. Still, I felt the fervor of the mission coursing through my veins. It had carried me through sundry trials thus far, including road-acquired ailments: one of my eyes, at present, was welded half shut thanks to an unknown irritant.

  The store that the sign advertised lived yet another level down, as if sent to a sub-subterranean time-out corner. Our soles squeaked down the staircase, bringing us into what turned out to be a dingy purveyor of everything from party favors (balloons and streamers) to random household items (clothespins, kitchen utensils, baby bibs). The clientele seemed mostly Latino and black. A woman reached out at us from an ill-defined enclosure at the front, a greeting that made me take a surprised step backward. She wanted our backpacks.

  I replied that actually I’d come down to mention that there was an error on one of the store’s dry-erase signs up the stairs.

  She stared at me.

  I could tell by her sour expression that I’d gotten this typo correction off to a rough start, effectively saying, I don’t trust you to take my bags or my money, much like you can’t be trusted to spell, woman!

  “Oh, my cousin did those,” she said. We waited like a couple of dolts for her to continue, then realized that she’d said all she had to say.

  “Uh, so …” Benjamin stumbled. Was the cousin going to fix it? Was it an idiot cousin who always made a mess of whatever she touched? Had that been a buck-passing maneuver so subtle we’d completely missed it?

  I decided it was best to ignore the response completely, treat it as a non sequitur, and begin again. “It’s just there are a couple of words misspelled.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she said.

  No, it wasn’t. I didn’t think I would be able to convince her of that, though. Of course, my customary line at this point in the conversation would have normally been that I could fix it no sweat Sally, but without the right kind of tool—a plague upon the permanence of mine markers!—I couldn’t do anything without marring the sign. Benjamin looked toward me expectantly. “It’d be an easy fix, and if you’ve got a dry-erase marker …”

  “Nope. My cousin did those signs. At home.”

  The one gap in their bountiful inventory! “Uh, if I came back with a dry-erase marker …”

  Ha, now she was the one thrown off.

  “Right,” Benjamin added.

  “Right,” I said. “So we’ll grab a dry-erase marker somewhere, and then we’ll come back.”

  “Oh … kay?” she said as we spun toward the red rubber stairs.

  Now we sought not only typos but a shop that might sell a dry-erase marker or two. We passed by groaning kiosks of purses and wallets, hats for every occasion (even pay-by-the-letter designer hats—I considered a TEAL hat, but they didn’t have them in teal), and assortments of items labeled “gifts” since you wouldn’t need any of those things yourself. We saw shirts and shoes and women’s accessories (no glitter was spared) and art and more clothes, but in spite of the wide, wild assortment of everything you never knew you desired, we couldn’t find the one thing we wanted to buy.

  We halted at a mid-mall clothing stand that featured dozens of locally designed Barack Obama T-shirts. We might not have noticed the mistake therein had it not been for our unwavering support of Obama, who was currently squaring off against Senator Clinton in a drawn-out Democratic presidential primary. As we perused the homemade wares, a typo on one shirt knocked us out of shopping mode and back into typo-correction territory.

  Speaking of territory. Typo correcting can be awkward enough, but this one offered an altogether new brand of discomfort. I read it aloud: “He’s black, and Im proud.” We looked at each other, and then took another look at our surroundings. Not that we’d been oblivious of the absolute lack of other white people until this moment; it simply hadn’t been a relevant factor in the equation until now.

  I could see the question on Benjamin’s face. Were we two white kids going to approach this nice black lady and criticize, in even a small way, this shirt that advocated pride in the most significant black public figure in decades?

  Yes. We wer
e. The whole point of typo correcting is that it’s a subcategory of a larger goal to improve communication. Could we back down from typo correcting when the perceived communication obstacles grew too large? We couldn’t, and we wouldn’t—the ideals of the League demanded that we summon our courage. This typo of all typos, here in the epicenter of a hundred and fifty years’ worth of racial clashes and tragedies, demanded redress. If we’d acted differently than usual, then that would have been, perhaps, racist. Our hesitation highlighted a crucial characteristic of racial tension within our generation: blacks and whites may not fear each other the way they once did, back when slavers owned Atlanta or bigots felled Dr. King, or even as recently as the Rodney King riots, but we do fear the awkwardness of failed communication attempts. The progress made by our parents’ generation gave us necessary social proscriptions against racism. But now we have the tendency to self-censor, to be overly delicate with the words we’re using. The irony here is that the fear of saying the wrong thing has focused us too much on how and not enough on what we’re saying. Speaking correctly has become more important than the substance of communication between blacks and whites specifically, and among all races in general. Even as I pen this, I find myself wondering if I should go with African-American instead of black. Uh, “communication between African-Americans and whites”? No wonder racial progress is in low gear.

  We approached the short, trim woman with graying hair who was attending the stand. She greeted us and asked if we were interested in anything, so I fell back on the reliable, more familiar awkwardness of explaining that I wasn’t shopping so much as typo correcting. “The Obama shirts caught my attention, as we’re both big Obama supporters. I noticed something about one I wanted to show you.” She left her seat and followed me around the stand. “See, we’re going around the country fixing typos, and …”

  I pointed out the shirt and the missing apostrophe.

  “You … probably don’t want us adding it in with a marker,” Benjamin said.

  “No, that’d be a bit much,” she agreed, pointing out a whole stack of them. With that many, I’d be afraid of making too big a marker blotch and ruining more than a few shirts. “But, now that I know about it, we can correct it on the next run.”

  For the most part, I’d wanted photographic proof of every typo corrected in order to count it as a correction, but since she’d come up with the solution and seemed thankful that we had mentioned the typo to her, I believed her. Benjamin’s well-calibrated alarm for detecting liars didn’t sound, either. We knew she wasn’t telling us this as an effort to repel us from her stall, because she then struck up a conversation.

  She told us how glad she was to talk with other Obama supporters and wondered what had drawn us to his campaign. Seeing as we were out of typo turf and into politics, I literally stepped back to give the expert proselytizer Benjamin room to gesticulate. Only then, as I became almost an outside observer of their conversation, did I feel the ponderous weight of subtext. She wasn’t asking “fellow supporters” to tell their favorite thing about Obama; she wanted to know how we two white kids had come to vote for a black candidate. I felt the familiar sensation of wanting to reach for my editing pen and make corrections to a rough draft. Red pen to slash through “white kids” and “black candidate” as I scribbled notes in the margins like: “Define your terms. Is black candidate any candidate whose skin is dark, or someone like Al Sharpton who only speaks to black voters and issues?” I listened as if from far away as Benjamin explained his preference for pragmatic, bottom-up solutions to political problems. Yet even my TEAL colleague failed to directly address the conversation’s thesis statement because he couldn’t blurt out, “I honestly don’t care that he’s black. That’s a bonus, I guess, for the future of American race relations, but the bonus isn’t the reason.” I wanted to cut whole sentences, redact phrases, and generally ask my authors for a more focused revision.

  “What about this Reverend Wright thing?”

  Benjamin explained that we’d been traveling and hadn’t heard about this yet. She gave us the abbreviated version, telling us that Obama’s pastor had spewed some anti-American rhetoric on clips that were now all over the news. Benjamin gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “They’re going after him for what his preacher says? Oh man, that sounds desperate. I think it’s a sign that he’s winning.”

  “You don’t think,” she asked us, tentatively, “that it’ll dissuade … some people from supporting him?”

  Some people. Which people? Us people? White people.

  What a treacherous verbal path we walked, black and white alike, and understandably so. Slavery had been abolished from the United States a bare hundred and fifty years ago; segregation, not even fifty years ago! In the mammoth scope of human history, this was basically yesterday. The scars were fresh, some of them still oozing. Factors like typos could only infect the wounds. In 2002, for instance, an African-American spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality appeared on MSNBC. His name was Niger Innis. Picture the worst way you could misspell his first name onscreen. Yeah, that actually happened. Or, in 2008, how about the “Lunch and Learn” event for Black History Month at Des Moines Area Community College, advertised in a widely distributed handbook as a “Linch and Learn”. Both of these errors were, I’m sure, completely unintentional, but they—and the outrage that followed each incident—speak to the dangers of carelessness, and the fragility of the peace forged among diverse quarters of the American population. (Let’s not even get into the seething cauldron of issues hinted at by the absentee ballots sent out in November 2008 to Rensselaer County, New York, voters, who had their choice between John McCain and … “Barack Osama”.)

  Anyway, would some people be scared away by Reverend Wright’s gaffes? Benjamin said no way and then proceeded to explain what he really liked about Obama—the man’s ability to take even the attacks against him, break them down, and analyze them. “He’ll end up responding in some way that turns it to his advantage, because he’s a great communicator.” There I heard it again, like an insistent tympanum behind the conversation that had steadily gained force and tempo: communication. As he explained his lack of concern, Benjamin essentially predicted Obama’s landmark speech on race that would come three days later, but I hardly noticed, caught in a revelation of my own.

  What if the typos themselves weren’t my real nemesis? Graver communication issues skulked in the shadows and back alleys of our conversations and relationships. What good would fixing spelling do if the message remained distorted? My mind reeled in the grip of these ideas. One typo—the absence of a tiny mark to contract “I am”—had triggered an illuminating conversation that I’d never have had otherwise. There was more to this than the mere hunting of typos. Without being able to express the true extent of my gratitude, I thanked our fellow Obama booster for her promised contribution to orthography, and we took our leave.

  I didn’t know how to explain my thoughts to Benjamin about communication troubles, my mission, and the dance of subtext I’d witnessed, so I didn’t bring them up. Instead we went on through Underground Atlanta, ate some subs, and caught a couple of spelling goofs topside that were encased in thick plastic: “entertainmvent,” a typo in the strictest sense of the word, and double-letter confusion with “pavillion”. Benjamin noted the phonetic logic of the latter, as double letters usually signal that the vowel preceding them is short.

  I wanted to reflect more on the discoveries I’d stumbled onto underground with the Obama correction, but first we had to complete the day’s initial objective: to find some dry-erase markers. Unfortunately, as we wandered around the downtown avenues, the clouds carried out their threat and let loose. At first we trudged on through the instant soaking, but as the intensity of falling rain increased and I noted the sky’s odd glow, some primal alarm went off in my brain. I saw a bus-stop shelter, shouted to Benjamin, and we dashed in and huddled in the corner with a woman who wouldn’t quite reach that baby shower on time. Two g
igantic, gift-filled pink bags sat on the bench beside her.

  The three of us watched the sky falling. The rain now plunged down not as individual drops but as thick, heavy sheets, slapping the streets with layers of water that overwhelmed the drainage system. Half the street flooded. I was regretting that I’d parked my pollen-covered Callie in a garage, since she could’ve used a bath, when we heard the first of a series of raps on the shelter that rang out above the sound of the slamming rain. Hail. I changed my mind about my car’s current crash pad, glad to have her safeguarded. Soon our ankles were being pelted with chunks of ice that ricocheted off the sidewalk. The shelter took a hard beating, and we watched cars crawling by, the water level halfway up their tires, their windshield wipers swinging like wild swords to fend off the attack of a thousand hailstones.

  Apparently a tornado had blown through here yesterday. Atlanta’s mayor, we later heard, had asked everyone to stay out of the city today. I’d never imagined that typo hunting could be fraught with such peril.

  When finally the storm had spent itself, returning to a hearty rain, we saw our shelter companion safely onto her bus and sloshed onward. Within minutes we found a CVS where I picked up an assortment of dry-erase markers. With a new appreciation for underground shopping, we returned, as promised, to the supposed cousin-rendered sign. Our work couldn’t be up to its usual standard. Despite the eras-ability of whiteboards, the text was meant to be permanent, and the letters were crammed too closely together to allow a natural insertion of the second n into PREGNACY, so I had to use the proofreader’s caret to do so. Having already marred this sign somewhat, I went ahead and crossed out the offending letters in SOUVINER and wrote in the correct ones above, considering after I finished that a quick arrow would have done the trick. Benjamin and I glared in mutual dissatisfaction at the sign, but we felt we’d met our daily obligation to humanity.