The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  Josh cracked San Francisco open like a mussel, seeking the sweet creature within. He did the same with every city on our itinerary, but this, the jubilant locus of northern California, came the closest to satisfying his voracity for new experiences and sights and craft beers. His wide-ranging enthusiasm helped to revive me somewhat from the travel-weariness I felt at this point. Without Josh, I would not have ventured into the recondite shops of Haight-Ashbury, would not have encountered the drugged-out denizens of Golden Gate Park, would not have sampled the city’s finest Vietnamese and Mexican, nor its nonfigurative and quite tasty mussels themselves. Nor would I have wound up at the Cartoon Art Museum, concealed in the financial district’s thicket of towers.

  At the time of our visit, the museum featured an exhibit on “Sex and Sensibility,” profiling ten female cartoonists and their work. What a splendid way, I thought, to honor some of the lesser-known players in the comics game, artists and writers and humorists who deserved more recognition for their talent. Then I started reading the biographical plaques—and the fires of righteous fury licked at the periphery of my vision.

  It was a whole gallery of errors. They ranged from relatively minor mistyping (“… raised in one of he lesser parts of the greater Chicago area,” “Her father often said in is jovial way …”) to words that were garbled (“I admit I became kind of a bif fishas flounder of Kirshenbaum …”) to places in the text where it appeared that whole words or even phrases were missing (“Interestingly, while she did not have a favorite Beatle, she did have a minute-and-a-half and then went on to work at numerous jobs …,” “I always loved to draw and really loved in a cartoony way”). There were mistakes littering every one of the ten biographies.

  Josh shook his head upon seeing the errors. “To think we paid six bucks a head to see this,” he said, disgusted. With stunning ease, he shed his tourist mantle, and his New Yorker aggression kicked in. “Let’s go tell them right now. Let’s make sure they fix every single typo!”

  “In the name of the League!” I agreed, but Josh was already moving.

  He marched over to the woman at the front desk; I hurried to follow. Thinking that his problem-solving approach might involve a quick jab to her face, I subtly shouldered him to the side and took over, asking to speak with the curator of the “Sex and Sensibility” exhibit. I explained that typos riddled all their biographies. Her eyes narrowed and she opened with a self-defensive maneuver. She said that they’d had a high-school intern type up most of the signs, as if it were acceptable to lay the blame on that poor kid.

  “Why don’t you come and take a look at the errors?” Josh said. He had decided to go with verbal pugilism rather than physical, so he added, “FYI, you’ll need a good ten minutes to see them all.”

  She walked over to the exhibit with us. I pointed out the “I became kind of a bif fishas flounder” one as an example. Before I could catalog the other mistakes for her, the museum associate changed tactics. She might have seen that these textual sins were too heavy to lay exclusively on the thin shoulders of the high-school intern. She now said that all the biography signs had been copied from a book that had inspired the exhibit. She claimed she’d done a couple of the signs herself and had noticed errors in the book biographies.

  Hmm. “So you faithfully copied the errors over into the exhibit signs?” I said.

  She didn’t respond to this, perhaps realizing that whatever answer she’d give would make her look even worse. Instead, she directed my attention to the book (itself titled Sex and Sensibility), which was in the museum gift shop. Josh and I leafed through until we found the biographies.

  “Aha!” Josh said. “Look, it’s right here—this woman was ‘kind of a big fish as founder of Kirshenbaum’. Not a freaking flounder!”

  A flounder is kind of a big fish, but I was sure the correlation was coincidental. We read on, realizing that the museum had to be the culprit for the mistakes. The book version of the biographies, the source material, was error-free. Only by reading them could we understand what the exhibit versions had been trying to say.

  We went back to the associate and I explained what we had found. For the integrity of the exhibit, and respect for the cartoonists themselves, could the museum fix the signs?

  The woman sighed. “You’re the first person who’s ever said anything about the mistakes. Here’s the name of the curator.” Then she added, “I really doubt that they’d get fixed even if you tell him about them.” With that, she delicately removed the gauntlet from her slender hand and threw it to the floor. I bent down and picked up the damascened steel glove, accepting the challenge, and Josh and I walked out. Given the hostile response from the museum associate, I didn’t hold out much hope that the curator would listen to little old me.

  So I set my readers on him. My minions, cropping up in ever-greater numbers each day on the TEAL blog. I’m not sure how many people harassed this poor caretaker through beseeching e-mails and phone calls, but from the reports that readers sent me, I’m guessing that the guy had a full in-box. The curator popped up on the blog a couple of days later saying that he’d had the signs corrected and begging that I call off the TEAL devotees, who apparently were still inundating him with “vitriolic and speculative” messages. I did, satisfied that justice had been wrought. When certain factions online questioned my judgment in loosing the pack in the first place, Josh stepped in—acting as my second in comment-section duels, on my blog and elsewhere—and vigorously defended me.

  We left San Francisco, raring to tackle the rest of the West Coast. But man, was there a lot of it left. North of San Francisco, the coast’s population drops sharply, and doesn’t pick up again until halfway into Oregon, somewhere around Eugene. We weathered six hours’ worth of driving—including a single typo correction at a remote deli—up to Klamath, California, where the very last hostel of the TEAL journey awaited us, a lone wooden house tucked in among endless woods by a stony shore. Somewhere along the way, the temperature had taken a sharp dive, marking our welcome to the Pacific Northwest. There were no typos to find near the hostel, nor indeed even a speck of civilization. Originally the plan had been to take in the nearby forest of redwoods, but by the time we arrived, night had fallen. We stepped out into the drizzle and smuggled booze into the hostel along with our food, knowing that we’d not leave the place until the light of morning.

  The next day we powered on all the way to Portland. Jane was in my thoughts constantly now. Her arrival at the Seattle airport was not far away, so every mile brought me closer to her. Again we found ourselves on the road for about six hours, and didn’t get into town until evening. Josh had proven a doughty companion for the road, taking intermittent shifts at the wheel, which were crucial at times like this for meeting the demanding pace of the itinerary. I’m not sure whether this trek or that of the previous day took the technical cake for longest travel day of the TEAL trip. All I know is that the consecution of two epic slogs made for tired Leaguers. Nonetheless, soon after we checked into our hotel, my brother in error-sleuthing said, “Let’s hit the town!”

  I remained in a state of collapse on my bed. “Can we do that from here?”

  “Man up!” said Josh. “We only have two nights in Portland, and I intend to enjoy them.” He began to search online for the most succulent dinner and distinctive spirits in the neighborhood.

  Yes, get out there, but forget grub, rebuked a voice in my head that sounded a lot like Benjamin. You haven’t done your hunt today.

  I’m hungry, and beat, I argued back. Tomorrow would be fine. Before Josh, I had spent more than three weeks on the road with the real Benjamin, who possessed a whole-minded focus on the mission and relative disinterest in sightseeing and cuisine. Why shouldn’t I now follow Josh’s lead and allocate a little more time for enjoyment?

  You’re on a daily mission, yo, said the haranguer, still in Benjamin masquerade. You should be … HUNTING!

  Hunting for typos in the dark?

  My internal inter
locutor hesitated. You could have found some already today. That’s two days in a row of slacking.

  Where? Where in the textless hills and vacant roads should I have gone looking? Was I supposed to conjure typos to fix from the insensate air, during all those lonely miles between San Francisco and here?

  The voice did not respond, so I considered the argument won. Josh and I headed out for burgers at an independent brewery. We ate well there and everywhere else during our brief stay in Portland, including a great breakfast place that through the power of their pancakes could be forgiven for refusing to let me fix their chalkboard. It was feeling like a real live vacation. Still, I could not help but remember the chiding voice in my head, accusing me of dereliction.

  Perhaps that was how I came to folly the next day. We met up with David Wolman, an enthusiast of the League whose book on the history of English spelling, Righting the Mother Tongue, would come out later that year (not to be confused with Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue, also a book about English language history). Wolman obviously had the same orthographic topics near to his own heart, but he expressed surprise upon meeting me that I wasn’t more of a hardliner. As a chronically poor speller, he’d suffered through countless indignities at the hands of unsympathetic schoolmarms and grammar cops. I wondered how he’d gotten the impression that I was like them; did I come off that way in the blog? As we chatted about wayward apostrophes and such at a bistro on Alberta Street, I mentioned a sign that I’d noticed on our way over, in the window of a restaurant closed for the day: “He was a bold man that first eat an oyster,” attributed to Jonathan Swift.

  “I keep mulling it over,” I said. “Obviously grammatical syntax was not quite the same in Swift’s day, and yet it seems … wrong to me.”

  Wolman agreed but could not be sure.

  “Why don’t we look it up online?” Josh said, offering up another brindled calf to the voracious elder gods of technology. I agreed to this, as Josh’s Google spellcheck trick had served us well back in San Francisco, when we’d confirmed the spelling of bustier in a secondhand clothing shop.

  Wolman pulled out a device with browsing capability and punched the quote into Google, both the way that the restaurant had it and the way that I thought it ought to be, “the man that first ate an oyster.” He announced that my way had returned more results than the restaurant’s way. The virtual jury had spoken.

  After our rendezvous with Wolman, Josh and I went back to the closed restaurant and taped a small sign over the window with our correction. Below it, we left a business card. We congratulated ourselves for bettering the restaurant’s image in the eyes of the dining public, and went off to grab some seafood.

  Only problem was, the virtual jury had been wrong. Later in the evening I did some Internet research of my own and discovered that “first eat an oyster” was, in fact, the correct wording of the Swift quote: “He was a bold Man, that first eat an Oyster” says the Colonel in Swift’s Polite Conversation (at least according to an 1892 printing). I felt the flush of terrible shame redden me from toe to crown. I knew then that I should not have rushed to fix something that I wasn’t absolutely sure was incorrect. Tie goes to the proprietor. Though we made no permanent alteration to the sign, the Swift blunder is still one of the two moments that I truly regret during the TEAL trip.*

  On we journeyed to Washington State the next day, and the sun broke the gloom, lending considerable beauty to Puget Sound as we arrived in Tacoma. My friend from kindergarten days, Carson, lived in an attractive neighborhood right by the water. He grilled some salmon and the three of us stayed up for a while that evening, getting drunk on wine and watching stupid television. This traditional display of camaraderie helped things feel normal for a while, until I realized I was still wearing my cowboy hat.

  “I’ve got to put in time at the base tomorrow,” said Carson. “Hey, if you want, I could—”

  “Show us around?!” Josh interrupted, slamming down his empty glass. “Oh yeah!” He clapped me on the shoulder, and I tore my gaze away from the bright parade of ephemera onscreen. Maybe it was an afterimage from the TV, or the wine, but I thought I could see jets swooping and barreling in Josh’s fervid eyes. “Don’t we, Jeff? We do, don’t we.”

  “Of course we do,” I said. McChord Air Force Base would be a poor venue for typo hunting, what with all the men with guns and all, but I wasn’t about to deny Josh the latest bounty on his quest to see the coolest stuff ever.

  “I considered being a fighter pilot,” Carson said to us the next day as we walked beside him on the tarmac of an airstrip. He was dressed in full lieutenant’s regalia, complete with jaunty hat. “But then I realized that I would rather just go someplace and have lunch.”

  Hence his decision to fly transport jets. Which still impressed the stuffing out of me and Josh. Carson had shown us the interior of a C-17 Globemaster III. It was a giant machine that would climb into the air and convey teenagers with guns to foreign lands. We met a few of these kids in the plane. I couldn’t help but feel silly. Here were guys several years younger than me with the means of war in their hands, and what was I doing? Semantically skirmishing with markers and elixir of correction? How could my frivolous quest even compare to the vitality of the lives these young men led?

  I came away from that C-17 troubled by doubts. The airmen I’d met could be certain that they were making a difference, protecting their country from fanatics and evil hearts. By contrast, the Jonathan Swift incident the other day had demonstrated the fine line I myself walked between helping and harming. What kind of good could I be doing, if it could so quickly turn to wrong? As we walked off the airstrip, Carson swiveled toward me and barked, “Jeff! Don’t step over that.”

  I had come close to crossing an innocuous red line painted on the tarmac, near the fence. “Why?”

  “Because if you do,” said Carson, “an alarm will be triggered, and the base police will come and shoot you.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  I stepped well clear of the mortal line, which upon closer inspection was accompanied by a legend saying something about “authorized deadly force.” Yes, it would have been helpful to see that earlier. Never had text been so vital to my well-being. Though I had broken many rules so far on the trip, I preferred to do so when the consequences were a little less severe—say, involving an angry shopkeeper instead of a squad with M16s.

  Way back in January, Josh had suggested a daring revision to our West Coast schedule: that we forge a path past Seattle and land in Vancouver for an evening, before doubling back to meet Jane’s arrival at Sea-Tac. So now we pushed on past Seattle and across the Canadian border, keen to spice up the Typo Hunt Across America with a dash of foreign savor.

  At the crossing, a gruff customs officer interrogated us about our purposes for visiting, trying to get us to admit that we were pot-heads who intended to harass the honest Canadian populace with our grubby mid-continental ways. We elected not to mention the true purpose of our visit, since it did, technically, include at least a minimum of harassment. Annoyance and discomfort had revealed themselves, I thought, as the golden core of TEAL.

  Using the interwebbing skills for which he is renowned, Josh landed us semi-swanky accommodations in downtown Vancouver for a decent price. My initial impression was that the city did not diverge in any noticeable fashion from many of the American cities that I’d already seen. But for the chill in the air, and the vaguely British twist to the spelling on signs, Vancouver could have been San Diego or Atlanta. The following day, we’d take a stroll in the giant park capping the north side, and that generous amount of wildness would lend some character to the city, but this evening’s perambulation along lively Robson Street gave a familiar impression. Our search yielded pretty much the same types of errors we’d been finding stateside (mostly missing letters and punctuation). Our correction rate remained low to nonexistent. We wished to be on our best behavior in a foreign land, and unfortunately most of the typos could not be fixed withou
t risking an international incident.

  Then we stopped.

  LONLEY? asked the chalkboard. YOU GOT A FRIEND IN BOOZE.

  Josh was the one who’d pointed out the sign. We peered at the specimen, and I felt a thin rivulet of confidence feed into my heart’s murky pool. I had done plenty of chalkboards on this trip. We could fell this typo for sure. There was an apostrophe mistake on the other side, too. Josh gave me a determined nod. I smiled. After all we’d been through, I could count on him as a hardened veteran of the League. He said, “Nobody’s looking right now. Let’s just do it—give me half of that chalk, and I’ll do one side and you do the other.”

  “Sure,” I said. “You get the apostrophe one, and I’ll do lonley.”

  “What?”

  “Lonley,” I repeated, confused now. “The typo you so astutely pointed out on this side of the board.”

  Josh peered at the chalkboard. “Oh yeah, that’s a good one!”

  “Uh … what were you looking at, if not that?”

  He indicated the next line down. “See, there. You got a friend. Should be You’ve got a friend.”

  “That’s not a typo. They’re trying to be slangy.”

  “It’s not right, though.”

  “It’s a style thing. You have to allow room for self-expression.”

  Josh shrugged. “All right, let’s do our corrections.”

  He went around and added the apostrophe needed on the other side. As carefully as I could, I converted the e to an l and vice versa in LONLEY on my side. When Josh came back, he decided to add his own correction below that, regardless of what I thought. Thus, to my dismay, a ’VE appeared, like a dark djinn summoned to fulfill the wishes of the black-hearted.

  “Dammit, Josh!” I said. “That wasn’t a typo. For real. Take that out.” He refused. And then it was clear to me: an insurgent had somehow entered the ranks of TEAL, right under my marker-flecked nose.