The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  As we transitioned back from the gimcrack/knickknack mind-set to appreciating the magnificence of the Canyon, I started snapping pictures, including the obligatory fake-angled shot of Benjamin clinging for life to a shrub at cliff’s edge. We followed a well-worn path leading past the railing that delimited the standard tourist area, into narrowing territory. The Canyon asserted its presence now on either side of us, but Benjamin gritted his teeth and forged on. We descended an outcropping of rock and rose again onto a ledge jutting out into the abyss. Here we again paused for pictures, and my fellow Leaguer snapped a portrait destined for fame, or at least for court documentation, depicting me with nothing but red chasm around me, wearing the camera strap around my chest like a sash, the Typo Correction Kit dangling benevolently at my side.

  We discovered that our cell phones didn’t get any reception, and I thought it for the best. The last thing the place needed was a bunch of people shouting, “Can you hear me now?” and attempting—and failing—to describe what they saw before them.

  After some navel-of-the-world-gazing, we adventured back to the watchtower. Benjamin had succumbed to the lure of the merchandising machine. He wanted to see if they had any postcards featuring gorgeous shots of the Canyon, which of course they did. Seeing as we were back inside the tower, we decided to return to the second level and its error-tainted sign. The floor was more crowded this time with other gawkers coming and going. I withdrew the yellow chalk that would put this sign to rights. Benjamin inconspicuously leaned forward and touched a finger to the apostrophe in “womens’”. The foul mark didn’t wipe off. We looked at each other. “It’s not a chalkboard,” he said, shocked.

  Here we made a fatal mistake in our reevaluation. The apostrophe’s permanence was the biggest hint that this was no mere prop announcing a restaurant’s specials du jour. Though it had that appearance, we should have guessed then that this sign was an inextricable feature of the place, more permanent than its resemblance to a held-back elementary school kid’s social studies project would imply. But we didn’t reexamine the big picture, as we were focused so much on the typo. Call it the Forest-for-the-Trees Fallacy, the very typo-hunting trap that I had warned myself against! Perhaps it was inevitable in a place like the Grand Canyon, which itself denies full vision of the whole. Our recalculations, then, centered only on the error: black background, paint on fiberboard, hmm, a marker could cover that apostrophe over. I passed Benjamin my marker. Now that we’d be using more than a finger to wipe it out, he’d have to wait with me for the decrease in traffic. We stepped back, and I noted that another tour was passing through. A ranger in glossy green led people down one stairwell and toward another, waiting for a few tourists coming up the stairs to clear the way. We hoped things would quiet in a moment.

  Though emense loomed as a ridiculous spelling, I wasn’t sure, what with the yellow chalk—no, paint?—if the elixir of correction would look presentable on that. So instead of going for the big correction, we decided to start with the small. To pass our moment of waiting, Benjamin read more of the sign and noted a spot needing a comma, where items in a list slammed together. The center of the room is occupied by a snake altar, a sandpainting, religious crooks and wands carved wood figures of kachinas … I remember skimming the sentence twice, first without and then with the proposed comma, and thinking in a Trussian way about how easily, in the absence of proper punctuation, sentences can come to grief.

  Benjamin nodded at me when a quick look around told him that there were fewer people around. We had little time, so we moved in, striking together. I added two white elixir marks: an apostrophe for women’s and the somewhat cosmetic comma to help prevent readers’ stumbling mid-sentence. At the same time, Benjamin, with a quick stroke of marker, wiped the author’s erroneously placed apostrophe from the sign so that no one need ever know. We stepped back, grimaced.

  To the discerning eye, the two white marks stood out too boldly. While many passersby might not have noticed the coloration difference, especially in this dimly lit room, anyone looking for something amiss would certainly see it. I didn’t bother with emense. Since I had discovered that my yellow chalk wouldn’t work, I had no correction tool that could make it look good enough. We decided to be glad for what we’d gotten—we’d corrected a majority of the errors in the sign, two out of three, so we’d still get credit in the all-important tally—and head out. Then we went into that other gift shop a hundred yards down the sidewalk and corrected another typo. Now that we’d ruined the whole day-off idea, I didn’t want it to be a single-typo day, especially not after such a fine string of high-count days. That accomplished, we returned to Callie for peanut butter sandwiches before driving on to the next site, clockwise around the Canyon.

  The next viewing spot was better: fewer people, no tourist shops at all, and a mere wire guardrail to keep cars from going over. We were free to wander right to the edge of a sheer cliff, lie flat upon the rock, and crawl forward so that our heads poked out over the absolute drop.

  TYPO TRIP TALLY

  Total found: 101

  Total corrected: 63

  11 | Pressed

  April 2–10, 2008 (Los Angeles, CA, to San Francisco, CA)

  Lights, cameras, and … typo hunt! While a new Recruit joins the ranks, and a faithful companion heads for the hills (or rather, mountains), our Crusader comes face to lens with the World of Television.

  I paced beneath an umbrella resembling a peppermint at an In-N-Out Burger stand, somewhere in the cosmic sprawl of Los Angeles. In one hand I held my cell phone. In the other, a cheeseburger leaked between my fingers. An NBC producer barked at me through the tiny speaker. I was doing my best imitation of a born Angeleno: alternately bringing the phone to my ear and the burger to my teeth, hoping that I would not confuse the routine. Josh Roberts had his shades off, letting the sun soak into his freckled visage. The abundant luminosity of the West was still a new thing for him.

  “Could you hold on a sec?” I said to the partially eaten burger, and I turned to Josh. “He’s playing hardass. Wants to film us before ABC, not after. Says that he called me first.”

  “Tell him too bad,” Josh said. “You just scheduled ABC.”

  “What if they can’t do it after?”

  “They’ll make the time.” He’d finished his own burger a few minutes ago and now plucked survivors from a cardboard dinghy of fries. Josh had ordered his Animal Style (mustard-fried patty, extra everything) off the secret menu, jumping into the adventure of In-N-Out headfirst with both feet (if that’s anatomically feasible) as he had with the trip itself. My new TEAL colleague demanded a fully realized adventure. He’d stepped off the plane in San Diego with a binder full of places to visit, shenanigans to undertake, and cuisine to consume along the West Coast; mustard-fried patties were but the barest beginning.

  I returned to the producer and told him our slot with ABC was fixed, but we’d gladly do a shooting with NBC afterward. He said gruffly that he wasn’t sure about that, he’d have to call me back. I frowned, looked to Josh again. “I don’t know if he’s going to be able to do that. Maybe I should have tried to move ABC.”

  “He’ll call back,” he said. “Listen, Jeff—I’ve worked with enough producers to know their act. They’ll wheedle you, they’ll guilt-trip you, they’ll bully you, whatever it takes to get the booking. But you’re the boss here. It should be on your terms, not theirs.”

  I nodded at Josh’s hard-won wisdom. He’d been immersed in the Biz for a long time through his commercial production gigs back in Manhattan. He was a pro, a clear-eyed operator who could bash through bluffs and feints with the blunt assertions of a native New Yorker. I, on the other hand, had never dealt with the good folks of the television industry, and my negotiation skills historically consisted of saying “Well, OK,” and then running away. The seeming absurdity of the situation didn’t help, either. They wanted me, an itinerant editor, on millions of TV screens?

  The producer called back. He’d relented;
the League would have consecutive filmings by the two major networks.

  The tale of TEAL had, by this time, proved irresistible to various journalistic outlets. Our coverage snowballed in the typical pattern that media stories follow these days, starting as a tiny sphere picking up jacks and thimbles, gaining greater mass as it went, until the ball of our exposure was gigantic enough to accrete cities and islands and the Earth itself. It began with an NPR morning show in New York. Since at that point I was less than twenty-four hours into the trip, and a thorough neophyte at media appearances, I succeeded in giving as awkward and ineloquent an interview as humanly possible. Elderly listeners developed arrhythmia and high blood pressure, and younger listeners swore off radio for life. The public-speaking industry held an emergency conference to address this new threat to oratory. Yet somehow the piece interested enough people for the Boston Globe to pick up the thread. From there, more radio, print, and online outfits put in their nickel on the League, until we arrived at the present surreal juncture.

  We headed for my cousin Steph’s old apartment in Hollywood; she had moved out the prior week, but the place was available for a few more days. Benjamin was staying with a friend, so we wouldn’t see him until tomorrow for the ABC filming. As soon as Josh and I got to Hollywood, we understood why my cousin’s move had been a sage idea. We spent many fruitless hours circling the streets for a parking spot, like buzzards in a carrion drought. We ended up stashing Callie overnight in a sketchy garage for a jacked-up, illicit after-hours rate. The neighborhood, however, did have one advantage: with its many stores and cafés and tourist attractions, it would be rich territory for typo hunting.

  The next day we met the ABC World News filming crew on Hollywood Boulevard, a block or two from my cousin’s old place. Benjamin had rejoined Josh and me—in fact, it was the first time that the three of us joined forces for typo hunting. But other factors complicated this auspicious occasion: the giant video camera floating in my wake, and the affable, gray-haired correspondent sauntering at my side. Ordinarily the success of our craft rested on careful wording and subtle approaches—but today the League was a spectacle.

  I presented as natural a face as I could to the TV folks, but secretly I chafed with worry. Unsupervised, unobserved, TEAL could work at a languid pace if it so desired, and it was free to fail due to wrong turns or simple bad luck. Now, though, the pressure was on. I had to find typos, and quickly, or we’d look like fools. And we had to get at least some of them corrected, or we’d look ineffectual, pointless. The correspondent and the camera guy nodded to each other, and the film began to roll. I smiled nervously and jumped into the nearest souvenir shop.

  My eyes scanned the displays, while Benjamin and Josh split off to do the same. Despite my nervousness, it took me all of thirty seconds to snare the first prey of the day for the League. Amid the commemorative sweatshirts and toy clapper boards, a small sign advertised Fine Art Monogram Souvenirs, whatever those were. In the text below the title lurked a classic mistake, one that we had seen before in a California ghost town three days prior: “Stationary,” when they’d meant Stationery. The sign was talking about notepaper, not standing in place. In normal circumstances I would have had the choice of either correcting the error on the sly or alerting the store manager, but the presence of my entourage made that choice for me. As everyone converged on me, seeing that I had found something, the manager materialized at my elbow.

  “Uh … hi,” I said to her. “We’ve got ‘stationary’ here, and it should actually be spelled e-r-y instead of a-r-y. Could I go ahead and fix that?”

  Everyone focused on the manager, including the all-seeing lens. She gave our company an uncertain look and decided that being accommodating on camera could only help business. “Sure.”

  “Should be a pretty simple fix here,” I said reassuringly, markering out the offending letter and painting in an e with elixir.

  “That’s a sign made by some stationery company,” the ABC correspondent said to me in disbelief (or at least an approximation of disbelief for the camera).

  I nodded. “You’d think they’d be more careful, but … they’re not.”

  As we continued our rounds, I thought about what physicists and psychologists term the “observer effect”: the changes that an observer inevitably makes on whatever she is observing, by the very act of observation. With the camera crew in tow, the reaction of each shopkeeper or clerk was automatically altered before I so much as opened my mouth. Sometimes the producer would hustle into a store to negotiate the right for me to enter the place, and often people would agree to corrections to appease the implied judgment of the video camera. Whenever the producer asked for permission to film us correcting typos, he was effectively asking permission for us to correct the typos as well. It was typo hunting through a skewed, La-La-Land lens, and it created its own reality.

  The correspondent, the producer, and the cameraman converged with a request. That first catch was good, but could I think a little bigger?

  Bigger? said I.

  More visual, they clarified. They wanted a big ol’ booboo that would heighten our little drama. They wanted another one of those Benjamin’s-head-sized apostrophes, something that I’d need to splash with a pail of correction fluid.

  “Er—sure,” I said.

  Aiming to please, Benjamin and Josh and I turned our hawklike eyes to the garish landscape around us. We unearthed errors in T-shirt stands, marquees, cafés, and of course more souvenir places. Then we came to The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, where our ABC friends offered to buy us beverages. I walked up to the counter and SWEEDISH BERRIES jumped out at me right away. A chalkboard typo, easy enough to fix, or so I thought. The producer talked to the baristas and came to us shaking his head: no cameras inside. At this, the cameraman shrugged, noting that he would have no problem shooting from the outside in through the large glass exterior of the coffee shop, so he went out to position himself. I brought the Sweedish up to the barista and requested a correction, and she paused. I knew that look well by now—the look that said Sorry, ace, I don’t know who you are or what you’re saying, and I don’t care. Brush-off in 3 … 2 … 1 … But before her dismissal could launch, her eyes darted behind me, and caught sight of the guy outside pointing a giant lens at her through the pane. Lo, how the camera did then perform its thaumaturgy upon her! Suddenly she smiled and said that she would fix the error straightaway, and she turned and transformed two es into one. Josh came over, not to offer his congratulations, but to boast that he’d found two punctuation-deprived signs on the same bathroom door.

  Afterward, I conferred with the correspondent, the producer, and the cameraman. How was that for visual? Did the spectacle through the window meet with their approval? For that was what I now craved.

  Well, they said. It was OK, it was visual, but perhaps still lacked zest, verve, a fresh and clean feeling. Could I be a shade more daring?

  Benjamin, Josh, and I nodded. We would push back the brushy frontiers of typo hunting. There were certain zones that we had previously feared to tread. We corrected mistakes in a tattoo and piercing parlor, where the proprietor was happy to concede to the producer’s requests, albeit with a sardonic smile. I reached up to make the minimum required fix to a sign reading WE DONT CARE!! HOW MUCH YOUR HOMIE CAN DO IT 4!!! We stalked the aisles of an army surplus store, where a sign for a HELLICOPTER HELMET didn’t mean to imply that none but infernal pilots could wear it. Both places I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to police without my attendant platoon. Here, again, the camera crew had given me a strange kind of access or influence. Though there were always trade-offs. For every typo I gained thanks to them, there’d be another I’d lose somewhere else, at a business run by camera-shy folks. It was like reciting a poem through a bullhorn.

  The ABC crew wrapped its footage of our corrections with their money shot: me adding the apostrophe to TODAYS SPECIAL, which was painted on the front window of a café. The cameraman ran back and forth through the d
oorway to film the action from both sides of the glass. After they had us take a couple of spins around the block in Callie so they could get driving shots, the first day of ordeals came to an end. I felt exhausted by the combination of typo hunting and pretending to be an interesting, photogenic person. As I calculated the day’s reckoning for the blog that night, I was astonished to find that we had netted an incredible total of seventeen typos found, nine of which we were able to correct. In other words, the single most productive day of the entire trip. Still, I couldn’t help but feel ambivalent about the whole thing. I was glad that the League’s mission would have high-profile coverage, but I also recoiled from the mechanism of the filming. It wasn’t so much that I minded playing the clown prince of correction—more that it had felt less personal and more antagonistic than ordinary TEAL practice. When a camera trails you like an unblinking henchman, your interactions with others automatically become more about you than anything else, stunts rather than meaningful conversations. We’d never intended to follow the model of Sacha Baron Cohen.