The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [100]
Benjamin returned to Silver Spring, where he obtained a copy of the entire complaint document and forwarded it my way. It described how “law-enforcement personnel were notified of a website … which described the vandalism of a historical sign inside the Desert View Watch Tower.” The document insisted on calling me “Jeff Michael Deck” throughout, presidential-assassin style. They must have pulled my middle name from my driver’s license (though they forgot to import the rey for Jeffrey). I tried to read through the sober text, so that I could more fully understand the grave charges arrayed against us. However, I couldn’t quite concentrate on the actual content. The customary scanning of my editor’s eye had uncovered much to abhor. No matter that this was a legal document, with every word presumably holding jurisprudential significance; typos had still crept in at every turn. Early in the document, Benjamin and I were said to have violated certain “criminal statues,” rather than statutes. I shuddered to visualize what violating statues would entail. Then, in a less kitschy context than explaining gnome magic, its/it’s confusion popped up: “The website describes the mission of it’s group …” Also, “this a 28 year old Benjamin Douglas Herson,” lacked some small but crucial word, plus he was from “Silver Springs, Maryland,” rather than Silver Spring. Surely the personified United-States of America, as complainant, knew the spelling of the city that was home to such important federal agencies as NOAA and the FDA.
Attachment B
In the face of catastrophe, some turn to drink, others to God or denial. I, apparently, fell back on proofreading.
The last page of the document was a picture labeled “Attachment B”. It was me standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, cowboy hat on, Typo Correction Kit at my side. Someone had helpfully drawn a thick arrow across the picture, pointing at the Kit and labeling it “Package containing markers”. The smoking gun! I laughed at this picture until my sides ached.
When I could finally manage to reread the document for meaning, it only became more perplexing. The Park Service apparently thought we’d been specifically targeting government-owned signs on our trip, and even that we’d attacked the watchtower sign specifically for its historic status. The architect of the tower, Mary Colter, had written the sign herself seventy-odd years ago. Benjamin and I had not known that, though. During the trip, we never intentionally corrected anything of historical and/or artistic value. Back at Kitty Hawk, we’d noted but never considered correcting a mistake in the picture of the newspaper edited by the Wright Brothers. In Santa Fe, I pointed out the problem of “St. Frances of Assissi” to the tour guide instead of acting on my own. In Ohio, my father had produced a clipping from his glory days of high school baseball, in which he’d pitched a no-hitter, the prize coveted by all who stand atop the mound. A mistyping had left a reference to a “hti,” but I’d held my father’s bit of history as sacrosanct. Though my eyes be keen, they can’t compare to those of an art historian, and both Benjamin and I deeply regretted our failure to recognize that the sign had belonged to that domain. The thought had just never occurred to us as we stumbled onto, in our view, an ugly little sign up the stairs from a gift shop, a sign that explained the purpose of the watchtower it occupied, but had no accompanying plaque or other indicator of its own age and value.*
Neither Benjamin nor I had any pals in Flagstaff, Arizona, never mind pals of a legal persuasion, so I scrambled blindly to find a barrister who could represent us in the town’s federal court. One lawyer gave me a promising initial evaluation—and then disappeared