by Jeff Deck
“No, you cannot. My boss wouldn’t like it. The corrections wouldn’t look good.”
At this point, another employee decided to join us. The first woman showed the newcomer the sign and explained that these two boys claimed that “year around” wasn’t right. “It isn’t right,” she replied. “It should be ‘year-round.’”
“And I was saying that it might be a pun.”
“… maybe.”
“They were also saying that ‘in doors’ was a typo.”
“It is. It should be ‘indoors,’ one word.”
At long last! She’d finally gone to a source of recognized authority who had issued a definitive confirmation of our claims.
I tried to address the second woman, in the hopes that she could take over. “Can we fix these for you?”
“Well, I don’t know. What did Hortense* say?” Uh-oh, she’d deferred back to the first woman. What was it with the reluctance to take authority here?
“I told them no,” she said, as if that were the end of it. As if she hadn’t been telling us no because she’d thought the sign was right. Then it occurred to me that perhaps she hadn’t been telling us no because the sign was right. That she’d been claiming the sign was right to make it easier to tell us no. I pushed that thought away—I couldn’t face what it implied. Perhaps knowing that I was about to ask her to reconsider, given her co-worker’s opinion, Hortense intoned, “I would rather have a sign spelled incorrectly than a tacky-looking sign.”
Benjamin, who’d moved to the side at some point, pulled out his poetry notepad. He wrote down that resonating, cynical statement word for word so that we’d have it later for the blog. It had a compelling meter to it, I had to admit. And as good poetry can, it transcended the moment and spoke for more than the PLAY IN DOORS sign. In that moment, Hortense spoke for many like-minded people, all those who emphasized style over substance, appearance over accuracy. I nodded. In the end, she’d managed to impress me after all—impress a fist right into my gut.
“That’s a good line,” I said, and we left.
“So much for an educational store,” Benjamin said as soon as we’d hit the sidewalk. “‘I would rather have a sign spelled incorrectly than a tacky-looking sign.’ Wow. That’s deep.”
“It does tend to sum things up, doesn’t it?” Indeed, that concern had prevented us from winning permission a number of times. God forbid anyone should see evidence of an error corrected. You’d hardly appear infallible by not correcting the error. Ahh, but the correction, if not done to blend in perfectly (as I always strove to do), would draw attention to what most people might not otherwise notice. You could get away with it. Sigh …
I mused on the cultural trend toward style over substance, and the more I thought about it, the more pervasive it seemed. Movies don’t need a plot so long as we get lots of explosions and/or enough topless women. The whole idea of a fashion industry, offering clothing for their visual appeal, has somehow supplanted the actual utility of clothing. So much glitz and glam, so much money spent on marketing, and I wonder if that number correlates to what’s spent on actually improving the products or services. I remembered in Las Vegas, we were visually stunned by the whole effect. “Looks like fun,” we’d agreed, not realizing we’d captured the true spirit of the city. Yeah, it looks like fun so it can distract you as the greenbacks fly out of your wallet. What would a Las Vegas of substance over style look and feel like? Charlie Rose Land?
I forced myself to lay these thoughts aside for a while and grabbed the volume of the complete works of Shakespeare I’d somehow left here the last time I’d been at my dad’s. I’d have to remember to bring this along when we left Hudson.
The next day we headed into Cleveland and began our hunt at the Great Lakes Science Center, located between the Browns Stadium and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yesterday’s troubles had inspired us to check out other educationally oriented sites such as this. I confess that we got a little lost in the fun of hands-on activities aimed at scientific minds somewhat younger than our own. We shouted echoes through tubes, balanced beach balls on air, set rubber rings spinning in place on a rotating metal disk, and sent puffy clouds of sublimating dry ice up to the ceiling. A couple times I had to turn myself around, saying, “Wait, I forgot to check for typos.”
Having then checked, the place reassured me. For all the text we scanned, we uncovered only three mistakes, all of which could have been true typos in the typographical error sense, missing a key or hitting the wrong one. The emphasis on being a science center hadn’t kept them from performing better than average on the English front. I think I expected a certain rivalry among the core subjects. I don’t care about multiplication tables—this is civics! The Center gets an A in English for finding room for copyediting while journeying through the many steps of the scientific method.
We found, encased in glass, a plaque announcing a winning “eight-grader” ’s science project. That one we couldn’t touch, but the other two we amended. A simple mark indicated “no where” should be brought together, elsewhere. Finally, “Galileo Galilel” was an extremely easy fix, as we merely converted the top of that final 1 into a dot, making it an i. For spelling one of their main dudes wrong, Benjamin votes that they get an A-minus instead. Of course, my A rating could be too generous for a different reason. We made the corrections ourselves since no one seemed to be anywhere around to ask. I shudder to think we might have gotten the same reaction we’d gotten at Miracle on Main Street; the discovery that another education-oriented environment disdained our similarly intentioned efforts would have cut too deeply. The context was different here, though. The Science Center had a strict focus on content. No one here could have produced anything similar to Hortense’s final remark without being laughed out of the halls of science. I could hear her now: “I’d rather misspell Galileo and confuse hundreds of children a day than have an ugly-looking exhibit explanation.” “I’d rather have a broken flight simulator than a homely-looking flight simulator.” No, I expected that the minds behind these accessible, effective exhibits wouldn’t have much trouble using a dictionary.
We strolled around Cleveland and found a few more typos before heading back to my dad’s, Bone Thugs blasting all the way. That night we shot some pool in my dad’s basement. Benjamin, still riled up from the Science Center, explained the physics behind each carom. Eventually I went to bed, but not to sleep. I’d put off going to bed because I knew that I couldn’t drift off, not yet. I suppose I ought to be grateful to Miracle on Main Street for bringing my attention to something that should have been obvious to me from the start: that “year around fun” means fun through spring, summer, winter, and fall. No, wait: that my mission had at its very foundation an eye toward education. How had I been able to count on this many mistakes, knowing that I could find at least one daily? More than probability was at work, and more than a casual malaise. Was spelling and grammar education missing a few pieces? As much as TEAL had decided to act as editors rather than “defenders” of the English language, our treatment of perceived mistakes was only half the story. Before people could make mistakes, or not, they still had to learn the basic mechanics of spelling and grammar. As we collected more typos, we thought we saw evidence that these essentials weren’t being fully acquired by the populace.
The contrast between what I’d found and what I’d expected to find gave me my first clue. I’d thought I would find a greater variety of typos. Sure, misspellings had caught my eye originally, and I’d known from the start that apostrophes would be problematic. Still, I’d imagined myself dealing with some of the more nuanced rules, earning thanks for explaining, “Couple is a tricky word. Like number, all, and none, these subjects can be singular or plural depending on context. While a couple (say, a couple of the toddlers in the room) could hold still for a picture you’re taking, in this case, the couple holds still. This couple functions as a single unit that happens to consist of two people in love, while the couple of toddlers are se
parate entities. The versus a is usually a good hint.” Even Benjamin, who hadn’t known if I was serious about the mission, had identified subject-verb disagreement as his archnemesis, and homophones as his weakness. We’d seen fewer than a dozen homophones, and the barest suggestions of subject-verb disagreement.
By the time we reached Ohio, TEAL had already caught more than three hundred typos. What we’d found first was lack of apostrophic confidence and then misspellings galore. It was the misspellings, Benjamin had explained, that brought him back. He’d seen a pattern, as if he were Alan Turing. Many of the problems were oral-to-written conversion problems. Even the apostrophe fits in here since there’s often no difference between the sound of the plural (watermelons taste great but peaches are better) and the possessive (a watermelon’s seeds get everywhere, but the peach’s pit is easy to deal with). With misspellings, intelligent people obviously knew the word they wanted and knew how to use it properly, but they just didn’t know how to spell it. So we knew where the problem was, and Benjamin hoped the specific examples we’d found would point to why.
As previously noted, English appears to be quite a mess. One could make vulgar analogies about the way it allows words from other languages to, um, enter into its own lexicon. But English’s ability to continually assimilate and grow is also a strong argument for its genius and beauty—and could even be a factor in its increasing dominance in world affairs. Certainly it improved our word selection to have similar words come in from different languages. Take a word like kill. Deriving ultimately from the Germanic küllen, it’s a short, punchy word that serves the basic idea of ending something’s life. It has a brutal and blunt sound. But if we’re talking about legally sanctioned killing, we don’t want to sound brutal, so we turn to the more technical execute, derived from Latin by way of Old French, which was long the language of law in Norman-conquered England (as mentioned in chapter 13). For other specialized contexts, we can employ words such as assassinate, which hails (in corrupted form) from Arabic. In spite of foreign influxes, written English remains about 84 percent phonetically logical. The thing is, the words we found during our trip didn’t seem as though they came from the 16-percent exception side of the aisle.
We were finding things that fit the rules, like “scalion” for scallion, “puding” for pudding, and “occassions” for occasions. Double-letter problems ran amok, but even they couldn’t compete with the vowel confusion, including “braclets” for bracelets, “absolutly” for absolutely, and “lemonaide” for lemonade. It’s easy to see the pattern now, even sticking to the ones we found in March, the pool of data from which Benjamin drew his conclusions. Vowel trouble and double letters. “Absolutly” and “braclets” together indicate a second category, along with my first real find, “referal” for referral. Both types of difficulties would often take place at the junction between a root word and a suffix. The larger pattern into which these pieces fit, however, was an impression that the speller operated by guesswork. If these words were botched in defiance of their own phonetic logic, then what was the principle that guided the speller? There wasn’t one. Many were guessing, as if they’d never been taught to pay attention to the letters while learning to read. When Benjamin stumbled upon a list of often-misspelled words in the 1955 classic Why Johnny Can’t Read, he was shocked to behold that, fifty years later, the book still held predictive validity for our findings on the road. Vowel trouble and double letters ruled the list, and the author, Rudolf Flesch, addressed them directly.
Were students taught to memorize the word lists and not taught how to spell? That’s how I remembered spelling class. We’d use a single set of words each week, then move on to a new set the next week. If you could spell them right on the first day of the week, you’d opt out of having to do that week’s spelling homework; otherwise you’d work with those words over and over. The hope was that the word lists would add up to a vocabulary. Later we’d get vocabulary words plucked from whatever books we read in English class, and thinking about the vocabulary words made me consider those spelling words from another angle. The idea of vocabulary words had been to teach you words you didn’t know, definitions and all. Felicitous, incessant, and everyone’s favorite word from Siddhartha: courtesan. But I knew what most of the words in my spelling book meant by the time I saw them. It was rare for the spelling book to add any words to your spoken vocabulary. The purpose was what it claimed: to teach you how to spell those words. Except that there’d been one simple oversight in methodology. There was no instruction toward teaching anyone how to spell the words. You just memorized them.
Oral language is a natural process, and the written correspondence has to be taught. When it comes to knowing words, children have budding oral lexicons that get a head start on the written. If we want to get kids spelling, reading, and writing, we have to teach them with a system of acquisition. We need to help them translate between the oral system they already possess and the written system. Looking back at the mistakes we’d found pointed to rules of spelling mechanics that hadn’t been firmly planted in the spellers’ minds. A doubled consonant makes the preceding vowel short, which might have been a helpful hint with “scalion” and “puding”. More than helpful, it should have ruled out a double s in “occassions,” which has a long a. Then there’s the silent e, which sits after a consonant and makes the vowel preceding that consonant a long vowel, or, as teachers might explain it, the silent e “makes the vowel say its name.” Hence the long a sound in brace or bracelets. I suppose I’d known these things on some level, with words like hope and hop, which became hoped and hopped, respectively. I couldn’t remember explicitly learning about it. Then Benjamin had returned, carrying notes he’d taken from crawling through a segment of the library. While he might be a Hippie in dismissing complaints about “the degradation of the language,” he did believe some helpful, basic facts had been missed by the methods that schools had their teachers using.
“They can’t handle the junction,” he’d said, back when I was in South Dakota. “Braclets” and “absolutly” were particularly painful for him to see as they were supposed to be the easy kind. Plus junctions: absolute + -ly = absolutely. Being able to recognize when to simply tack on the suffix and when something had to give, that was the first step. Then with that other kind of junction, the change junction, came the mutually exclusive consonant-doubling and e-dropping rules. Hop × -ed = hopped, and hope × -ed = hoped. Note that with these rules you preserve the phonetic integrity of the original words.
Hortense from Miracle on Main Street came to mind once more. Wasn’t the problem she’d had with the dictionary the same problem that everyone seemed to be having with spelling? She had the dictionary right there, but she hadn’t been taught how to use it. Teach kids to use a dictionary and give them the basic construction of phonics, and they ought to be able to spell most of the words they can say.* Once they actually get reading, the engine turns over, and they begin acquiring words both from conversation and from what they see on paper. We could give them the proverbial fishing pole rather than carping on lists of words. Otherwise, it’ll all depend on what you can cram. In that case, I guess I’d have to thank my parents for a great verbal memory.
I thought back to the dozens of spelling mistakes I’d seen along the way. We’re all using way more words than anyone can simply memorize. I suppose if you hold yourself to a limited vocabulary, you ought to be able to remember how to spell all the words you use, right? Or, if there’s no dictionary handy, you should avoid writing a note to someone that uses words you can’t recall, effectively making your written representation slightly less well versed than your spoken self. Those were my half-hallucinatory thoughts as I finally drifted off to sleep. I dreamed of classrooms with rows and rows of students, all taking a spelling test on the contents of the entire dictionary. Some students looked harried as they tried to remember the words and keep up with the monotonous teacher-voice listing the words; others had given up. I saw one little girl co
loring a picture. She smiled up at me and said that the teacher won’t mark her off as long as her paper looks pretty. Another kid was repeating tricks he’d learned for spelling individual words: “Wed-nes-day, Oh, see the ocean, desert is barren and only has one s but dessert is yummy and has two of them, there’s a rat in separate, Feb-ru-ary …”
“Isn’t this the information age?” I shouted. “What’s the point of memorizing the whole dictionary?” My words echoed pointlessly on through the scholastic corridors of my nightmare.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 358
Total corrected: 192
* Said Holmes in his first recorded mystery, A Study in Scarlet : “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.”
* See chapter 16.
* Name has been changed to protect the irrational.
* Dealing with the exception words is typically the last part of phonics instruction.
16 | How Do You Deal?
May 11–16, 2008 (Albany, NY, to Manchester, NH)
Comedy or Tragedy, ’tis sometimes difficult to see when one lives the Play. Though in sight of familiar territory, the Journey nearly at its end, still the unwavering armies of error must be beaten back. From an Albany Fair, through the very Knowledge Halls wherein the idea of TEAL has its faintest beginnings, and at last into our Hero’s stomping grounds of yore, astonishingly varied responses muddle the Duo. Sic vita est.
