The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  “I think so,” she said, and followed me out to the very edge of her jurisdiction. I’d been reaching for my camera to take a quick photo, but she took one look and, while saying, “Yeah, that’s wrong,” swiped a hand across the last two letters of the original rendering, ERICSON.

  Wow! Immediate action! So immediate that I swore that, from this day forward, I would be certain to snap a photo before mentioning a given typo to anyone. As it happened, I now had a dry-erase marker, albeit not in exactly the right color, that could aid in the correction. We thanked her, and she thanked us, and we thanked her for thanking us. After an awkward pause during which Benjamin and I separately considered that we already had beautiful girlfriends waiting for us back at our respective homes, we parted company from our fetching, forthright ally.

  When I wondered aloud about the difference between RadioShack and our other two encounters, Benjamin burst into hearty laughter.

  “RadioShack! Of course!”*

  Our last stop was to roam Target for a strap for my Typo Correction Kit, like the one I used for my camera bag. I’d envisioned crossing the straps like bandoliers over my chest, a badass gesture that would send the message to grammatical vandals, defilers of language, and other itinerant evildoers that trifling with Jeff Deck would be one’s final trifle. Failing to find something appropriate, Benjamin grabbed a carabiner clip from the camping equipment section, and I simply linked the Kit to my camera strap. Now I felt like an authentic typo hunter, wearing the weapons of my trade. We exited the mall through the nearest department store and breathed the carbon-monoxide-tinged air of the parking lot with gratitude. Our mall adventure had yielded dispiriting results, but at least we’d broken new territory.

  The following morning we hit the road for New Orleans, stopping in Biloxi, Mississippi, on the way (an adventure outside the bailiwick of our tale; suffice it to say that if you ever blow a tire in the South, look for Jerry, repairer of rubber and mender of dreams). By the time we arrived in the French Quarter, afternoon had already begun, and with it a hearty wind. The wind didn’t prevent us from consuming some beignets at Café du Monde, but it did send the powder from those beignets all across Benjamin’s jeans and T-shirt. My white-speckled companion and I proceeded to tramp down Decatur Street. Despite the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, this neighborhood stood pretty much intact.

  After our troubles of the previous day, I confess we started out our typo correcting in stealth. Benjamin had been raving for some time now about the ratio of corrected typos versus total found. The percentage had dipped a hair below fifty percent in his first days on board, but we’d gotten it back on track by Beaufort, North Carolina. Since then it had wavered barely above that mark, ever threatening to fall again. With a horde of uncorrected Mobile typos, we’d begun the day at twenty-two of forty-two corrected, only one ahead of the zone of shame. Thus goaded, I consented to his nefarious strategy without much reluctance. We took down several typos via covert assassination, including a Styrofoam sign in a shop window and a cardboard sign for plastic reptiles at a tented bazaar. While fixing the latter, I wondered if many new speakers of the English language made New Orleans their home. We’d set a hard rule for the League to never go after non-native speakers. Those new to our language deserved to be cut some extra slack; English can still get difficult on me, and I’ve been using it my whole life. The spirit of TEAL focused on catching errors made by lifelong speakers, not by those who were still learning the basics.* In practice, this meant bypassing ethnic restaurants, stores, and sometimes even whole neighborhoods. Occasionally, though, we couldn’t even tell whether we’d run into a second-language situation. People don’t always fit into obvious categories. In those cases, more often than not, we stayed our pens.

  Our clandestine campaign came to an end when I spied a blackboard typo that we had to bring to someone’s attention. We went inside Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, where the lifestyle embodied by the song could be supplemented by the purchase of faux-tropical tchotchkes. The store seethed with employees lacking an immediate purpose, so we figured that we could peel at least one off to grant the permission we desired.

  A friendly guy in a festive shirt came over. “What can I do for you?”

  “Hi,” I said, “we couldn’t help but notice that Thursday was spelled wrong on your blackboard outside. With your permission, we’d like to fix it.”

  He said, “Sure, if it’s wrong, we can fix it. Lemme see.” We stepped back outside to look at the blackboard. Then something astonishing happened—the man laughed. “Oh no, we close at seven Monday to Thrusday? And it’s all flowery and everything. I know who did this. Hold on, don’t fix it yet, I got to show Jerome this.”

  He retrieved one of his co-workers, who, once shown the mistake on the blackboard, also had a titter over it. Then both of them reentered the store and came out a few seconds later with the employee who had probably made the error in the first place. She, too, was gracious enough not to get annoyed, even though her co-workers kidded her about it. Thrusday! We’d finally found some people who got it. They laughed again when we told them about our mission. Benjamin mentioned how little errors like this popped up everywhere, mitigating the sign writer’s embarrassment. Mimicking her flowery style as best I could, I swapped the letters and we made to depart, but the first guy told us to hold on for a moment longer, as he had a final errand back inside Margaritaville. Within two shakes of a tumbler, he emerged with a prize for us—a prize, for pointing out the mistake! We were now the beaming owners of a TIME FLIES WHEN YOU’RE HAVING RUM bumper sticker.

  What a pleasant shift, we thought, from the latent hostility we had suffered yesterday in the Mobile mall. Here were employees who weren’t afraid of acknowledging mistakes. Granted, an alteration in chalk carried less grave potential consequences than fixing permanent signs, but the gratis token of appreciation had helped to make the distinction plain. This was what I’d hoped for, a friendly reaction to our quest, displaying humor and gratitude. Sure, I’d expected that many wouldn’t like being told they’d made a mistake, but I saw my efforts as a clear boon for humankind. Reactions like Margaritaville should thus have been more common, but they weren’t, making this one all the sweeter.

  Benjamin checked his cell phone. “If you want to head back to the car so we don’t have to pay for another hour, now’s the time.”

  I nodded, and we sped up, until one last typo blazed out at me from the window of a tourist center. “Dear God, that thing’s huge,” I said.

  “Another hour it is, then,” Benjamin replied, following me into the place.

  Inside, a middle-aged woman surrounded by pamphlets on various attractions and arcana of New Orleans ruled over a surprisingly large amount of office space. I deduced why the room was so big when I spotted a couple of Segways parked over in the corner—tourists would be able to fumble around open floor for a while before taking to the narrow streets. I went up to the woman and smiled. “Hello! We noticed that the word cemetery was spelled wrong on your sign in the window.”

  She seemed dazed by this pronouncement, and her gaze didn’t follow my finger to the window. Instead, she gave both of us an uncertain stare. Pranksters? Miscreants? Even worse?

  “It should have an e instead of an a,” said Benjamin, pointing at the reverse of the sign through the window. “See?” He helpfully plucked up a flyer that rendered the word with all three of its es.

  “We’d like to fix it,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

  She eventually looked at the sign. “Oh, you’re right.” Immediately she switched from wariness to staunchly supporting our cause. “Hey, we hired somebody to do those signs.” Ah, I hadn’t even spotted the second copy of the sign in another window. Double the error and potential shame brought upon the tour office. “We didn’t do those ourselves. We paid a lot to get them done, and hell, they didn’t do it right, did they?”

  “We’re actually traveling the country correcting typos,” Benjamin said.

  �
��It’d be nice to have this as another success story,” I said.

  “Well, hold on,” said the woman. “I’m going to call someone right now to complain about this.” She picked up the phone and spoke to her supervisor without preamble. “Hey, you know those big signs we paid two hundred and fifty bucks each for? They’ve got a mistake. Two guys came in and pointed it out. Cemetery with an a. Yeah. These guys are going around the country fixing typos, and they want to fix these, make this a success story. Uh-huh. All right.” She hung up. “Well, you are welcome to fix them, but I’m not sure how you’re going to be able to do that. I mean, we still want them to look professional …”

  “Got it. Do you have a red pen or red marker?” I asked.

  “No …” She searched around the pamphlet stands. “No, I don’t believe I do. I can bring something in tomorrow from home, though. Just come back tomorrow and you can fix these.”

  An earnest offer, not an attempt to get rid of us. But tomorrow night happened to be the first night I’d actually booked ahead, at a hostel in Lafayette. We said we’d hunt down a marker, a familiar mission that we hoped this time wouldn’t invite hailstorms.

  “Okay, you can check the Walgreen’s up the street. You know, if you boys are looking for typos, you came to the right place. You’ll find them all over this town. Why, the other day I saw a big pink building with a yellow and blue sign, said WE SALE FISH. Now, what kind of sense does that make?” She proceeded to regale us with stories on every typo she had ever found throughout the watchful course of her life. I found it interesting that our mission would trigger such a monologue. Indeed, in other stops we made around the country, many people we met had typo tales of their own to share, usually unbidden. I think most of us must carry a kind of repository of errors noticed and internalized during a lifetime of bombardment by signs and ads and billboards and flyers. We may not even be aware of the repository until it is unlocked by the right stimulus—say, for example, a couple of yahoos walking around with elixir of correction.

  Having a destination and directions for our marker-finding mission turned out to be helpful. I debated whether a red marker alone would be a sufficient enrichment of the Typo Correction Kit. Who knew what other hues a typo might choose to garb itself in? I ended up adding a whole rainbow’s array of Sharpies to my arsenal.

  When we came back, we saw that the woman had some actual customers to attend to, sweaty Midwesterners manhandling the Segways. So we just went about our business. Benjamin and I pried the signs from the windows and laid them out on the flattest surfaces available. As I uncapped my elixir and red marker, the tour office manager paused in giving instructions to the tourists, as if she could smell fresh corrective fluid. She stared us down and said, “It better look good.”

  Benjamin looked apprehensive at this sterner shade to the woman’s tone, but I felt confident in my altering abilities. I worked at the a first, blotting out the offending portions, then used marker to shade in areas that would complete the letter’s transformation to an e. I repeated vowel surgery on the other sign, and then we erected the beneficiaries of our handiwork, Benjamin climbing up on the windowsill to affix the higher copy. Once they’d been put back in place, the proprietor thanked us, noting that the signs looked great. A success story indeed, and one of my overall favorite typo corrections.

  All in all, New Orleans was one of the most receptive cities to typo correcting that the League found during its entire journey. The employees we’d happened upon had demonstrated the most autonomy. A little faith in basic human judgment can do wonders.

  TYPO TRIP TALLY

  Total found: 50

  Total corrected: 28

  * Mallrats (1995).

  * Granted, a good number of words stray from pure phonetic representation, but we’ll get to that in Chapter 13 and beyond.

  * When I asked Benjamin what had induced his hysterics, he offered a story about autonomous action, RadioShack, and one of his favorite bands. Matthew Good Band, a Canadian rock group, had shot a video featuring a RadioShack logo and a scene inside the store. The general manager of that store—and fan of the band—even got a cameo in the video. The band had gotten permission, presumably via the GM, from the regional office. When the video came out, and people at the national level heard the lyric “Down at the RadioShack/We’re turnin’ sh*t into solid gold,” they attempted to sue the band for using the storefront in the video. The suit didn’t go far, of course, as the band had approving signatures from the regional office.

  * There already exists a cottage industry for this in websites such as Engrish.com.

  8 | Davy Jones Isn’t a Biblical Figure

  March 20, 2008 (Lafayette, LA, to Galveston, TX)

  Plans cast aside like naughty apostrophes plucked from plural nouns, our Young Adventurers tack southward. Controversy, FLAME, and government regulations abound; truly, everything is Bigger in Texas.

  “Those drivers’ll kill you,” the hostel clerk had said. “They will run you right off the road in Houston, swear to God.”

  Benjamin and I had shivered, as if we were huddled by a campfire listening to the grisly tale of the Halberd-Wielding Hitchhiker instead of baking in the midmorning Louisiana heat. The clerk shed her identity as front-desk guardian of the Blue Moon, Lafayette’s preeminent hostel-slash-honky-tonk, and embraced her camp-counselor role, leaning toward us with a darkening brow. She described to us six lanes’ worth of unadulterated fear, populated exclusively by motorists whose driving education had been paid for by the blood of pedestrians. “So when you see that Houston skyline in the distance, watch out.” Her eyes grew dim with remembered horrors.

  We checked out and did not look back at the Ancient Mariner of the bayou. As we approached the Texas border, the de facto boundary in my mind between familiar East and the alien territories of the West, we considered heeding the warning of the desk clerk and bypassing Houston. My U.S. guidebook confirmed her dire words about the city: “Visitors should be prepared … to get lost more than once.” I pictured a frenzy of glittering windshields in the heat, death-machines caroming at my poor girl with a conscious intent to murder. Benjamin recalled hearing a tale once of Houston drivers moving bumper to bumper on the highway—at seventy miles per hour.

  When we pulled over to investigate one of the Waffle Houses, which had become a regular fixture of the Southern terrain, we discussed it over hash browns. Did we dare veer from my carefully prepared itinerary to avoid down-home Southern vehicular manslaughter? Benjamin unfurled his trusty map, and our eyes simultaneously landed on an alternative destination: Galveston. He confessed to a fascination with the town. I agreed, remembering details from my hostel guide. “A beach resort,” I said brightly, “an island beach resort … in Texas! Imagine that! We could even go for a swim.”

  He fixed me with a peculiar glance. That hadn’t been what he’d meant. Having read Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson, about the deadly hurricane that struck Galveston in 1900, Benjamin couldn’t understand its continued existence as a city. “Larson explains in the book that Galveston Bay’s features serve to effectively maximize the damage of hurricanes’ storm surges. I sort of assumed, when I finished reading the book, that everyone had given up on it. Packed up and left.”

  Apparently not. Two weeks into the trek around the country, we strayed from my original course thanks to Benjamin’s curiosity, my desire for an ocean dip, and the clerk’s terror-inducing warnings. We parted ways with I-10, taking a jaunt south to the lustrous Gulf of Mexico, which we would hug for almost thirty miles until eventually confronting a pier. Partway through this stretch of sunny, quiet coast, we made an heinous discovery. I immediately pulled over to the side of the road and Benjamin and I walked back to examine the object that had so affronted us—not through its existence alone, but also the fell undercurrents that, at least to Benjamin, it implied.

  Thus Canal City becomes ANAL CITY.

  “Well!” Benjamin said, his eyes popping even more than was customary. “We are
in trouble.”

  I frowned. “It’s too bad that the juvenile delinquents of the Bolivar Peninsula don’t have anything better to do, but I don’t see how that means trouble for us.”

  He responded with a knowing laugh that I didn’t like.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “Oh, what refreshing naïveté to think that this is the isolated work of a couple of Dos Equis–swilling punks with Freudian hangups,” said Benjamin.

  “Er … what else would it be?”

  He looked out across the sea, a troubled cast settling over his bewhiskered face. “I’ve long suspected their existence. But I never thought I’d see evidence like this.”

  “Evidence of what?!”

  Benjamin paused before answering, his eyes narrowing and his fists curling. “FLAME,” he finally intoned. “Our dark inverse.”

  I looked to the sign again, but I found no guidance there. “All right,” I said, “I give up. I’ll bite. What does FLAME mean?”

  “The Fiendish League for Advancing Mistakes in English,” he replied, shaking his head at my astonishing ignorance. “Or, as they would have it, Feindish Leege 4 Addvancen Missteaks n Englesh. Even as we roam the nation performing good grammatical deeds, my dear Deck, I fear these villains are doing the same with acts of absolute evil.”

  After a significant pause, he added, “And … Great Scott, I just realized …” I sighed in exasperation as I waited for him to continue. “I didn’t pack any swim trunks,” he said. “I can’t go for a swim when we get there.”

  Leaving the perverse (and probably wholly imaginary) world of FLAME behind for the time being, we returned to the drive, watching the stilt houses go by. Eventually we came to the end of the road, or at least the end for cars lacking amphibian outfitting. I had seen the (belated) warning from Authority several miles back that there would be a ferry involved. I hadn’t forgotten the off-season ferry debacle back in North Carolina, but I figured this time, since we were headed for an island, and a touristy one at that, the ferry had to be running. To my delight, we saw a queue of cars, and a boat hove into view on distant waters. Here the ferry ran year-round, and was free, what a bonus!