The Great Typo Hunt

by Jeff Deck

  “I’m in the middle of nowhere. They don’t cotton much to words out here.”

  “Excuses!”

  I couldn’t hold back anymore. I spilled all of my doubts and frustrations. I told him about the internal war that the Hawk and the Hippie seemed to be waging in the guts of our mission.

  He didn’t sound surprised in the least. “I could already tell that something was different. I’m not sure I have the answers you’re looking for—but we’ll figure them out as we go.”

  “We?”

  “You heard me, dude,” Benjamin said. “TEAL needs me back on the team. I know that shotgun seat is opening up once your Jane heads back home. So, Deck, I’m putting the Appalachian Trail off for a year. It’ll still be there in 2009.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Light began to diffuse into the dark future of the League.

  “I’ll see you in Chi-town,” said Benjamin.

  TYPO TRIP TALLY

  Total found: 276

  Total corrected: 140

  * The Oxford English Dictionary would expand upon the use of quotations in quantity as well as depth, as the makers of this comprehensive and literally exhaustive dictionary didn’t just add sample sentences to show the words in use, but also worked to track down the earliest written appearances of the words.

  * More on Latin specifically next chapter.

  14 | The Epic Chapter Wherein Heroes Battle and the Scenery Flashes Past

  April 27-May 1, 2008 (Minneapolis, MN; Madison, WI; Chicago, IL; Bloomington, IN; Cincinnati, OH; Newport, KY)

  Reunited with his faithful friend and foil, our Hero charges into the last battle for the soul of the League. Taking opposing sides, these Allies spar through the snowy streets of Madison, tread carefully around mental land mines in the Windy City, are nearly mad driven on Indiana roads, and finish Once and For All over the Ohio River.

  I shall skip describing the scene at the Minneapolis airport, where Jane and I bade each other farewell, lest the upwelling of your tears streak the ink of these pages and damage this highly collectible book. I returned to Callie, alone for the first time in seven weeks. Perhaps if I could have crawled into some eremite cave, the sudden aloneness wouldn’t have been so loud, but as it was, I had a mission. In the Twin Cities, my destination was clear: the Mall of America, a monument to capitalism and testament to Americanism—complete with roller coaster—that could not be passed over. Unfortunately, the typos therein were all too easy to pass over. I failed to correct a single one of the eight I found, dropping me under the fifty-percent correction mark.

  Back in the infinite warrens of the mall’s parking garage, I called Benjamin to find out when he’d arrive in Chicago.

  “Hey man,” he said, “if your typo hunting’s done this early, you could always move on to your next stop. That’s Katie and Lisa, right? You sound way down. Madison’s your best bet.”

  I set off on the four-and-a-half-hour drive without hesitation, stopping briefly to unfurl my limbs and void my bladder. Western Wisconsin was still lonely territory, and I considered how, when I’d first envisioned the trip, it had been as a solo run. The sun set behind me and darkness fell like a coconut on an animated noggin, eliciting a swirl of stars in the open sky. I pulled up to the home of my college friends, and Katie bounded out into the cold night to bear-hug me. A cat tried to dash through the screen door when I greeted Lisa. I looked around, noted the futon already unfolded into a bed, and the paused image from Collateral. From a chair pointed at the television, a face popped up, belonging to a guest I had not foreseen. Benjamin smiled his wily smile.

  “Surprise!” he roared. After more than three weeks away from the mission, my old friend looked refreshed and geared up to tackle orthographic chicanery once more. “I couldn’t come all the way out to the Midwest without seeing these two crazy kids—I haven’t seen them since the wedding!” The girls, of course, were laughing. I joined in, and my curdled heart squeaked with joy.

  The next morning, Lisa suggested a promising neighborhood for typo hunting, and a faithful reader had posted the address of Brennan’s, a combined produce market and local food store. In spite of the temperature hovering at the freezing point, I felt ready to dive in, but I cautioned Benjamin that I might be more of a spotter than a corrector. “I may be seeing it Jane’s way. Maybe I’m more of a descriptivist.”

  “No, you’re not, Deck. A Grammar Hippie couldn’t have dreamt up this mission. You may not be a true Hawk, either, but what we need first is momentum. We’ll talk on the way. You tell me what you think, and I’ll—”

  “Play devil’s advocate?”

  Benjamin shrugged. “No, tell you why you’re wrong.”

  I responded with equal sarcasm, channeling Bill Murray: “I love this plan. I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it.”

  At Brennan’s, I mentioned the possibility that I’d been lying to myself about the value of these corrections. Plenty of the typos we’d found had gone long unnoticed, and few clouded comprehension. Over at the apple stand, I found a perfect example. No one needed the first n in Washington to recognize the name. I wondered how many people had even heard of Washington Piñata apples, and if they started calling them “Washigton Piñata,” so what?

  “A slippery slope, that’s what. You gonna fix this? I want strawberries.”

  “I’ll go ask.” I went up to a woman at the center of the store and told her that I’d found a sign missing a letter, offering to fix it since I was going around the country fixing typos. I practically spat it out in one breath as I saw her eyes starting to glaze over.

  “Oh no, we’ll take care of it,” she said, though I hadn’t told her what or where the typo was. Then, in a voice reserved for the preadolescent set: “We have a special marker for those signs.” We moved on to the other part of the store, but not before she said—as if to a co-worker, but loud enough so we could hear it—“Oh, whoops, looks like I spelled ‘strawberry’ wrong.” I started to turn back, and she added, “Oh wait. No, I didn’t.” And she glared at me. In that moment, the cashier eerily resembled a few of my exes, making me grateful for Jane’s sweet presence in my life all over again.

  “Mm,” Benjamin commented. “Now I’d really like to fix that typo. Anyway.” He proceeded to argue that words used to have multiple spellings, and they’d been understandable, sure, but reading was much easier now. As an example, he offered his father. Due to his dyslexia, the goal of correctly processing what he was reading had trumped learning how to spell, which he’d never quite come back to pick up. “It takes more effort to decipher his e-mails, man. His choices of phonetic representations don’t always make sense to me. If everyone decided spelling conventions don’t matter, we’d get a growing variety of spellings for each word, and when you factor in accents … good luck.” Agreed-upon spellings made the act of reading much quicker for society as a whole. If we relaxed our standards, we would still understand most text, but it would be more difficult, and it would take more time. Issues of wrongness aside, ignoring those spelling norms was really just rude. Benjamin said, “So you mind that slippery slope, man. The next step’s a doozy.”

  We paid for the food and went back into the part of the store with the apples. Benjamin grabbed my green marker and walked up to a guy stocking the shelves from a box across from our “Washigton” apples. “Hey, check this out. There’s an n missing in ‘Washington’. Mind if I write it in real quick?”

  The guy shrugged and said, “Sure.”

  I caught my jaw on its way down. Benjamin inserted a tiny letter, almost like an apostrophe, thanked the guy, and headed for the exit. “So yeah,” I said, by which I meant, It’s great to have you back.

  “I know,” Benjamin said. “The wonders of apathy.” Sometimes it works against you, sometimes with you. That’s the thing about apathy; it doesn’t care. “The ol’ ‘If Mom says no, ask Dad’ trick. Works like a charm. Actually, it never worked on my parents.” Even so, that had been golden delicious.

&nbs
p; A cold wind pushed against us as we headed to the car, and the first squadron of snowflakes descended from a dull gray sky. As we headed to State Street, Benjamin and I began a conversation that blurred our surroundings into a similar gray. The stores and scenes and text we passed faded, save for the insistent luminescence of the typos that continued snagging my attention as we swept by. The conversation became the single tangible element of our world, a clamor of argument and counterpoint, with neighborhoods and cities swishing by unnoticed as swords swung and shields clashed.

  Benjamin was right that spelling standards had helped. Once that printing press began to crank out words, perhaps a fixing (in terms of freezing in place) of the language was inevitable. Wider access to the written word meant a greater need for standardization. Increasingly better dictionaries offered not only a growing volume of words, with meanings, but also spellings that came to be viewed as authoritative. That’s when some rode the swinging pendulum too far: they tried to fix (in terms of correcting) the language. A true breed of Hawks hatched, and things got messier. An upper-class campaign chose Latin as the gold standard of languages and worked to alter English accordingly. They played havoc with the spellings of words, altering some to be more like their Latin roots, and even Latinizing words from other languages. That’s how we got silent letters in words like doubt and island. The Hawks also added grammatical rules to make English function more like Latin (or seem to); one rule finally dying out is the prohibition against splitting infinitives. Back at the publishing house in D.C., my boss had pulled me aside to note that I’d let a split infinitive “get past” me. I drew him up a quick little poster in which his own cartoon head informed him that “to blithely split” infinitives is perfectly acceptable, allowing us “to fully utilize” our language’s range of expression. We’ve been friends ever since.

  “Hold on,” Benjamin interrupted. “You haven’t changed any split infinitives. You wouldn’t. You invented the rules for TEAL in the first place—so you can decide how much of a stickler you want to be. We can discard all of those nonsense dicta that limit expression and don’t truly enhance clarity. What we’re after are obvious errors, helping correct slip-ups, not forcing people to bend to our grammatical will.” Benjamin seemed to think I could walk some mediating line between Hawks and Hippies, but I had trouble seeing it through the thickening snow. “We’re too binary, stuck on ones and zeros, ones and zeros. Forget who you fit with or don’t. Stick to what we’re actually doing.”

  Fine. We greeted a woman with her hands in a customer’s hair. “Uh, the sign in your window has a couple letters flipped,” I said, indicating the “ect” in place of etc. “Do you mind if I fix it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Well jab me with an apostrophe and call me a contraction. I had not expected that chipper reaction. We removed and reversed the sticky letters. “We’ve gotten comments on the blog from the Hippies that language changes,” I said, wiping out a plural apostrophe as we passed it on the sidewalk. “Grammatical rules, words’ meanings and spellings, it’s all in flux, and that can’t be stopped. Is my mission at odds with a natural process? Language can’t be preserved. Anything that fixed is dead. Like our late friend Latin.” I grabbed a Counting Crows album from the rock-pop rack as a prop. “Isn’t that why you love these guys? They put their songs through new arrangements, rather than playing the studio versions at concerts.” Benjamin nodded. He didn’t go to shows to hear the album again—that could be done at home. “If there could be one final form of English that remained truly pure, we’d soon need a new language for actual use.”

  “Point to you,” my companion conceded. “But ad instead of and, like we saw in the Atlanta parking garage, isn’t language change. I doubt Las Vegas’s extra s in greatest is going to catch on because I have never heard anyone say ‘greastest’. These are errors, unquestionably. Language change is so gradual that it’s mostly invisible.” In Watching English Change, Laurie Bauer notes that most specific changes can only be pointed to after the fact, and more amusingly, that the one real sign of shifting meanings or spellings at the time is the complaints of Hawks trying (and failing) to stop them. “How about that ‘seafoood’ back in New Mexico? Come on, man.

  “And what about people’s names?” he added as I made corrections to CAPTAIN BEEFHART and JIMMY BUFFET. “That’s not how Jimmy Buffett spells his own name, so end of story.”

  My thoughts returned to e.e. cummings. Didn’t the true sovereigns of the language often buck literary conventions that didn’t serve them? Shakespeare invented words at his convenience. Kerouac had his own style of punctuation that made sense for his writings. Twain, who pushed for some spelling reforms of his own, used true phonetic representations of words to re-create the accents of his characters. Cummings used all of those tricks and more to force people to read his work exactly as he wanted them to. Even if you can’t fake a passable Russian accent, reading the poem “kumrads die because they’re told)” aloud will force you into one.

  “Kids in school need to get the basics straight so that they can experiment wisely,” Benjamin replied. “There’s a huge difference between using sentence fragments like Hemingway, for effect, and using them erratically and inelegantly because you don’t know how to construct a basic sentence. This is the part that the Hawks would get right if they stuck to concerns about clarity—without limiting expression.”

  Rules that aided the clarity of a sentence had an internal logic, like the rule about where to place antecedents (nouns being referred to by some other word) to avoid pronoun confusion. “When he took a deep sniff of the black marker, Benjamin deduced that Jeff needed a break from typo hunting.” This is not a great sentence because the pronoun he could refer to two possible antecedents—either Benjamin or Jeff. So who sniffed the marker? Did Benjamin take the sniff and thus gain deductive powers? Here’s a clearer sentence: “When Jeff took a deep sniff of the black marker, Benjamin deduced that his friend needed a break from typo hunting.” Note that I cut the pronoun out of the picture altogether—if I’d said “Benjamin deduced that he needed a break,” it would still be unclear which guy the he referred to.

  Guidelines masquerading as rules, on the other hand, operated from caprice rather than logic, like the one about not starting sentences with but, and, or because. That might help elementary schoolers avoid mistaking dependent clauses for sentences, but later on, no one remembered to tell the kids to remove those training wheels. “Because of that prohibition, I couldn’t fully utilize because,” I pointed out. The outer fringes of the vast dorsal mantle of Chicago oozed onto the horizon. “Besides, people speak in sentence fragments all the time.”

  “Let’s keep the written separate from the spoken for now,” Benjamin said.

  “Some of these arguments are going to cross over,” I said.

  “Yeah, but TEAL’s mission is focused on the written word, and we should zoom in on that stuff. You even said it on NPR.” When my story had been featured on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, they’d pulled a sound bite from me on how written mistakes can linger forever while a verbal remark disappears into the ether. “Lots of the mistakes we’re finding are specifically written mistakes that aren’t about language at all. They’re about the mechanics of our written system, the sound-symbol correspondence, the way we add the suffix to the root on paper. Those are the ones I got kinda intense about when I hit the library. Am I making any sense?”

  Two separate levels of symbolism were at work here. Language, the oral process, is a single level all by itself. Somehow, in our separate tribes, we’ve agreed upon sounds to represent most every conceivable thing, action, descriptive detail, et cetera (or “ect” if you prefer). The sounds dog and blue are not onomatopoeic, like vroooom or whoooosh—they don’t have any connection to what they represent beyond the significance we’ve given them. This first level is innate to our species. Babies naturally acquire and then begin to utilize spoken language, both the lexicon and grammatical patterns of a given
language.

  The use of written symbols to represent the sounds we make, and the combination of those symbols to create the word-units, is a second and very different level. The written word follows behind the oral, but written language is not a natural creation. It has to be taught to us. This is why failing our kids on the educational front leads to illiterate but not mute children. When children can’t—or won’t—speak, we assume something’s physiologically or psychologically wrong with them.

  I looked up and caught a massive sign for MILWUAKEE FURNITURE. The letters were definitely bigger than the Arizona billboard apostrophe, making this the physically largest error yet. The Chicago Tribune reporter who’d been shadowing us for the last few blocks nodded appreciatively; there was an error worthy of the paper. Benjamin shot me a glance: See, there’s another one. This wasn’t about language change. It was specifically an editorial problem, an issue with the written word, an error born of inattention.

  Stick to what we’re actually doing, Benjamin had suggested. TEAL concerned itself only with the written word. No wonder both Hawk and Hippie perspectives felt wrong. I’d brought checkers onto the chessboard. After spending time with Josh the Hawk and Jane the Hippie, I’d gotten too spun around by the extremes when so much of that debate didn’t apply to TEAL.

  “I personally,” Benjamin confessed, “have descriptivist leanings. Your mission certainly feels prescriptivist. Like I said, it’s not something a laissez-faire descriptivist could have come up with.” On the Kinsey scale of linguistic orientation, he suggested the following: Josh = 0, Jeff = 2 (though I’d perhaps started as a 1), Benjamin = 4, and Jane = 6. What I’d first thought of as zeros and ones was in reality zeros and sixes. I’d missed the whole range in the middle.