by Jeff Deck
There had been a moment, fortunately, that clarified our motives and would appear in the actual piece, during a walk-and-talk that I did with the correspondent.
“You’re very nice about it,” he pointed out.
“It’s not about making anybody feel bad, or, uh, or, uh, making somebody look stupid or something, it’s just really about going after the errors themselves,” said I with typical eloquence. This stance genuinely seemed to surprise him, as it contrasted with the unsympathetic, commas-and-brimstone temperament of most high-profile grammarians and sticklers. If viewers could take away that message—that blame should have no place in spelling and grammar—then our appearance would have been well worth the trouble.
Not that the trouble was over. We had to do it all over again the next day.
The three of us rendezvoused with NBC’s Today crew at the Larchmont Village shopping district. The tree-lined street was a lot quieter than Hollywood Boulevard, feeling almost like a neighborhood in a normal city. The correspondent was younger than the ABC guy had been, playing more the hip contemporary than the amused observer. He wanted to find something that he could correct himself, because it would make a great visual. Could we go ahead and locate a sexily obvious typo? he asked us. That part sounded familiar.
First, though, the driving shots. Like ABC, they wanted to capture us cruising around in my car, but NBC harvested far more shots in this pursuit. At first I didn’t get the fixation on Callie—she was a loyal old gal, but what did she have to do with the meat of our mission? I’d explained to them that we didn’t spot all that many typos from the car. Then I realized that they had placed much importance on describing the visual language of the road trip. I am driving from city to city, so the viewer must see me physically behind the wheel, peering out the car windows, not to mention actually turning the key and starting the engine. We must create a simulacrum of traveling. The viewer might not understand otherwise. They lent Josh a video camera and instructed him to lean out the window to film Callie’s wheels in motion.
The shortest part of the day was the typo hunting. Benjamin, Josh, and I had our voyeur-friendly routine down by now. We walked down the street and into promising establishments with deliberate steps, turning our bright faces to each other and attempting to make sound-bite-worthy comments. Upon entering Sam’s Bagels, I spotted the misspelled varietals JALEPENO and PUMPER-NICKLE, and the proprietor was happy to take the signs down and correct them himself. There wasn’t much else to unearth on the street, however. We found a few more typos in boutiques here and there, but the haul paled in comparison to yesterday’s. Nothing was big and beautiful enough for the correspondent himself to correct, and he seemed disappointed. Before we could try ranging farther for richer material, the crew declared that they had enough footage of our craft. They’d come up with a better idea for the correspondent’s stand-up.
A “stand-up” is the correspondent directly addressing the camera, usually at the end of a piece, and it doesn’t always involve standing up. For our piece, the correspondent sat at a table outside a café. Josh, Benjamin, and I were supposed to walk up behind him, sit down, and point out his name spelled wrong in the chyron below. Ho-ho, a virtual typo. We walked down that street about fifteen times, squeezed tightly against each other so that we all fit in the camera’s eye, while they tried to time his speech to a perfect shot of us sitting down behind his table. It was fun, like we were C-listers making our big-screen debut in Three Men Walk Purposefully Down the Sidewalk. Once they gave us the thumbs-up, we TEALers hurrahed. A job well done, now time for lemonade!
But then the producer called me over, gesturing toward the car, and we topped off the day’s filming with even more driving shots. Once again, the TV guys had decided that the imagery of the car—us driving around in the car, us getting into the car—was a necessary piece of the visual story. What could visually declare that this was a Road Trip better than guys in car? Where NBC put extra emphasis on the shots of Callie, ABC had put some extra emphasis on my Typo Correction Kit, an invention wholly my own, built and refined during the westward journey. They’d had me lay its contents on a table for a slow pan, and they made sure to include the Kit in shots of me. Both news teams had to assemble what was basically a two-minute movie, which had to include a proper setup and a catchy ending. I sympathized with the demands of storytelling. I only wondered what stories they were planning to tell.
The NBC folks departed, and then I had to say good-bye to my friend. If Benjamin were not about to hike the Appalachian Trail, I’d be worried about his ability to move on from the visceral thrills of tracking down typos. I was more concerned about his departure’s effect on the League. Okay, its effect on me. How could I carry on without his zeal?
“Thanks for everything, buddy,” I said. “I would never have made it this far without your help.”
“Oh,” he demurred, grasping my hand in a firm shake, “I’m sure you would have, geographically. But maybe not with a correction rate over fifty percent.”
A numbers man to the end, I thought. “Well, have a safe flight back,” I said. “And when you take your walk in the woods, stick to the path!”
“You get your ass up to Seattle—and Jane—in one piece,” said Benjamin, and he headed for the nearest subway station on the Boulevard.
I opened the car door, but then I heard, “Oh, and Deck …” So I turned.
Benjamin stood some distance away on the sidewalk, pointing a pen at me. “The League is in your hands now!” he called. “Make me proud.”
I saluted him with the Typo Correction Kit. Then he was gone, a champion off to new campaigns.
A few days later, first the Today piece and then the World News story aired. Josh and I didn’t have a TV at our hostel in San Luis Obispo, so I had to catch the ABC clip online the next morning. I sat on the quilted bedspread, eating a Pop-Tart and Googling my own name. Before clicking on the video of the piece, I read the text associated with it—and froze. The toaster pastry fell from my hand.
“Typo Eradication Assistance League?”
“Uh-oh,” Josh muttered.
The initial wave of stories about TEAL consisted largely of positive, sympathetic coverage, with equally positive reader response. We rejoiced in these pieces, seeing them as a confirmation that people besides us actually cared about the nits and grits of spelling and grammar. A few of the pieces strove for a deeper understanding of the mission, such as a story by the Chicago Tribune, which brought up the same dilemma of independent-store identity that I had fretted over in Santa Fe. However, something was missing from most of the stories about the League.
Our journey was, on the surface, simple. Man Drives Across U.S. Fixing Typos. There it is in six words. The what of the story is straightforward, which is probably what made it an attractive subject in the first place. The why of our story, however, is rather more complicated. Even we didn’t have a full grasp of that part, at least not yet. Thus, whenever media outlets tried, in truncated fashion, to address the reasons for our mission, the results were less than enlightening. The Today piece on TEAL opened with the anchor saying, “In today’s world of text messaging, odd abbreviations take the place of actually spelling out a word, so some would argue it’s actually helped many of us forget the rules of the English language.”
The blame-it-on-texts meme also popped up in the Seattle Times, the Virginian-Pilot, the Albany Times-Union (quoting a local English teacher), the Nashua Telegraph, the Longmont Times-Call, and London’s Guardian (“the barbarous neologisms of text-speak”), though I said not a word about texting in my interviews. It was a general, unexamined answer for why modern spelling often falters—easy, pithy, and therefore useful.* Note the Today anchor’s use of that slippery word some. “Some would argue” that texting is destroying English. Nobody specific is actually mentioned here, so the viewer would have to assume that it’s common knowledge, and even that we Leaguers had undertaken our trip for that reason. Jack Shafer, Slate magazine’s curmudgeonly media crit
ic, classifies some, along with many, few, often, seems, likely, and more, as “weasel-words,” a favorite tool of journalists “who haven’t found the data to support their argument.”
Blaming spelling errors on cell-phone argot is silly enough. We veer painfully close to the aching borderlands of irony, though, when there are errors in stories about guys fixing errors. Coverage of our mission included a bushel of outright mistakes, all of which could have easily been avoided by taking a second glance at the TEAL website. These weren’t obscure bits of arcana, just the answers to basic questions:
What does “TEAL” stand for? Not only did we apparently call ourselves the “Typo Eradication Assistance League,” but we were also known as the Typo Elimination Advancement League, according to the article in The Dartmouth. I admit that I chose a long name for our team for humorous effect, but come on.
What are our names? In the print edition of the Boston Globe story about us, a photo caption identified me as Benjamin and Benjamin as me. The identity of my bewhiskered companion came constantly into question. The Baltimore Sun ran a photo caption identifying Benjamin as the twenty-third president of the United States—Benjamin Harrison. He appeared in the World Almanac, of all places, wearing my middle name as his first, as Michael Herson. The magazine Utne Reader inexplicably referred to him as Jeremy, perhaps to help him fit in with the rest of the League, Jeff, Josh, and Jane.
Where did the trip start? The Guardian had us beginning our trip in San Francisco and heading due east, perhaps confused by the BBC interview I did in San Francisco. Portland’s Oregonian got the starting city right, but then blew its spelling: “Summerville,” Massachusetts? Sounds magical!
What did I say? Britain’s The Sun apparently took as gospel an article on TEAL in the satirical magazine Private Eye, quoting me as lobbing rather harsh words: “Some people just have no feeling for language.” The BBC Magazine Monitor, in turn, dutifully quoted The Sun as quoting me saying that. Call me Jeremy if you want, but don’t put words in my mouth, mates.
We were only some dudes driving around with markers. It’s not like they screwed up reportage on an Iraq offensive, so who cares about whether they got our little story right? But every word in a news story presumably rests on research; every dollop of delicious factual nougat has supposedly been vetted by somebody. The widespread occurrence of errors about our trip gets a body wondering … what other stories have been misreported? One of the most egregious recent examples involved all the major media outlets parroting a story about a California paraplegic being healed by the bite of a brown recluse spider. Turns out nobody stopped to catch their breath and check the facts. The paraplegic was probably never paraplegic in the first place, which doctors only discovered once the spider bite got the guy to the hospital. Plus, there are no brown recluses in California, at least not outside of the arachnid zoo. Even if it had been one, the brown recluse’s venom is cytotoxic—it breaks down cells instead of repairing them.
Sounds ridiculous, until you consider that if a paper or website or cable channel doesn’t jump on a breaking story right away, they’ll look slow, out of touch. We, the consumers of all massively distributed information, made them that way. We demand information faster with each passing year and each emergent technology, heedless of that information’s accuracy, seeking only to keep the data IV pumping into our ravenous vessels. What is actually said matters less than its immediacy. It doesn’t have to be this way, though.
O fellow slaves to the datastream, I exhort you! Rise up and shuck your shackles!
Ahem. All right, I’m not an expert, I just played one on TV. Already far too much media criticism bobs around the Oceanus of the Internet, unsolicited and often hooting and jeering. The media are overextended and fighting to stay afloat, with shrinking revenues, massive staff layoffs, and unsustainable business models. So I won’t join the harpoon-slinging pack. I’m a guy who likes to read every piece of text he passes by; I tend to amble and ruminate. My ideal mediaverse would feature fewer, longer pieces in print and online; trading the cable-news trend of obsessively gnawing a few lean story bones for more measured, thoughtful coverage; and journos who have time to get the story right because readers and viewers chill while the fact-checkers earn their paychecks.* I suspect we could all live with considerably less fluff in our news diet, as well. Nonprofit investigative news outfits like ProPublica and public radio programs by NPR and American Public Media provide an excellent antidote to shallow stories, but they rely on donations to survive. I’m not suggesting that everyone run out and get an All Things Considered tote bag, or that television networks altruistically cut the entertainment angle from news programs, returning them to their original loss-leader status. I merely offer an observation for your consideration: Every time we change the channel or click a link, we determine the path trod by the media beast.
Days later, I steeled my nerves and stepped out in front of the slow surge of cars. I was on a steep hill in San Francisco; I’d had to wait for a trolley to clatter by. Across the street, an attractive blond producer named Zoë beckoned to me. A blight upon sexy British accents, I thought as I clomped along at a deliberate pace, trying to ignore the blare of horns and the menace of nearby bumpers. After about five lonely weeks on the road, I would have walked into traffic for just about any winsome smile. Jane was nearly a hemisphere away, and I missed her terribly.
The BBC’s coverage of the League had hardly turned out more sophisticated than that of its American counterparts. They opted for a Wild West theme, thanks to the Santa Fe hat that I still wore as a spur to the mission. At this moment I found myself participating in a staging of the lone cowboy forging ahead through a herd of steel cattle, or at least that’s what they seemed to be reaching for. I’d recently completed a slew of takes of me walking up the hill, and then back down to come back up again. The theatre of the piece had required many other shots—even more, it seemed, than either of the TV crews had wanted in Los Angeles. These folks needed me walking and tapping the “holstered” Typo Correction Kit at my side and walking some more. They needed the hat, and the shadow of the hat. The correspondent had performed little magic tricks between takes, to stave off monotony.
At a Beat Museum dedicated to Jack Kerouac and his cohorts, the BBC correspondent had seen something Kerouackian—Kero-wacky, if you will—in my mission and thus deemed the locale appropriate for a walk-and-talk that would end the piece. This piece of stagecraft would involve us waltzing by a bin of books, picking one of them up, and then me explaining to the correspondent why TEAL stood for all those who did not have the faculty to express themselves as well as Kerouac, or some bollocks like that. They wanted a smooth sound bite from me that would encapsulate the mission’s purpose. What they got was several takes, with us continually walking back over to the bin while I mumbled something different each time. Sometimes when I picked up a book, I’d drop it on the floor. At take five or six, the correspondent looked like he’d rather be doing a magic trick, or anything else.
Probably the most awkward stop had been at a sex shop in the North Beach neighborhood. As with the tattoo parlor and the army-surplus place back on Hollywood Boulevard in L.A., I became filled with the compulsion and courage to go into a more unconventional venue to correct typos, in large part due to the camera crew at my back. I found a pair of typos right away in an ad for a lube that apparently possessed the following traits: MIMICS THE BODIES OWN LUBRICATING FLUIDS, and COMPATIBLE WITH CONDOMS & DIAPHRAMS. The subsequent awkwardness was caused not by the owner of the shop—who turned out to be a nice guy who was happy to let me correct the mistakes—but by the mere, leering presence of me and a British news outfit in such a place. We had barged into the establishment essentially for an expected comedic payoff. I felt more like a feckless mountebank than ever. Sheepishly I made my correction with the camera rolling.
Now, if I made it to the curb without dying, my ordeal would be over. I pressed on, steadily avoiding a peek at the annoyed San Franciscans in their h
ybrid Priuses and Jettas. When I reached the sidewalk, Zoë exchanged signals with the far cameraman and then clapped me on the back. “Right, then, brilliant,” she said. “How about a beer?”
We headed back to their car, where we saw that the correspondent had fallen asleep, his face pressed against the window. The cameraman took some optional footage of this, and we all headed to their hotel’s bar. I enjoyed three rum-and-Cokes on the BBC and inwardly toasted Benjamin with his favorite drink.
In the morning I did an interview with a Minnesota Public Radio show called Grammar Grater, which assembles thoughtful weekly episodes on spelling and grammar. My confidence on air had power-leveled since the NPR stutterfest on the second day of the trip. Of course, I could also credit my alertness in the interview to the coarse wakeup of the morning’s previous interview, with a pair of Iowan shock jocks (though, how shocking could they be, interviewing a grammarian?). As the style of my interviewers swung from fart jokes to engaged questions, I could see the contradictory forces yanking at the public over the airwaves, some daring to offer us insight, some quailing to go near such a thing. I couldn’t have guessed that an altogether different tug-of-war lay in store for my mission, with ropes taut and combatants ready to pull.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 183
Total corrected: 104
* Hopefully, informed debunkings such as David Crystal’s recent Txtng: The Gr8 Deb8 will finally lay this myth to rest.
* Six-fifty an hour, as I recall from my intern days.
12 | You Got a Friend
April 12–17, 2008 (San Francisco, CA, to Vancouver, BC)
As they round the treacherous curves of the PCH, our Hero and his new firebrand companion do great Deeds in the name of their mother Tongue. Yet all is not well. There is a traitor among them, and a frightening revelation, in the manner of an evil Chicken, is coming home to roost in the head of our Hero.
