The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [101]
The contract listed my name as “Jeffrey Deek”.
Up to this point, I had refused to entertain the notion that Benjamin and I might not return from Flagstaff. Now my only thoughts were whether the federal pen out there had air-conditioning.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 437
Total corrected: 236
TYPO TRIAL TALLY
Total found: 2
Total corrected: 0
* We had misjudged one other thing about the sign: we’d thought “emense” was a misspelling of immense, though we didn’t correct it. Benjamin would discover that the Oxford English Dictionary considers “emense” to be an acceptable alternative rendering. A critic, Ammon Shea, who had consumed the entire OED and evidently got indigestion for his trouble, also pointed out that Renaissance printer William Caxton, as well as Lewis and Clark, used that rendering of the word. Perhaps Mary Colter habitually used archaic spelling, for yuks. So at least we’d only corrected the mistakes that were in fact mistakes. I’d never unfixed an item during the TEAL trip.
18 | Court of Opinion
August 10–12, 2008, and the days that followed (Dallas–Fort Worth, TX; Phoenix and Flagstaff, AZ)
How far our Heroes have fallen. They are brought before an unsympathetic judge to answer for their Crimes against America. The punishment, like a banged gavel, will have a resounding Impact, and the future of TEAL hangs in the balance. The media join the assault and twist TEAL into a forced punchline. A year of misery begins …
Benjamin sat at the gate among other Phoenix-bound travelers, reading a book but looking miserable. Not for the first time, I felt a touch of guilt at what I’d gotten him into. The plane tickets had not been cheap. Our lawyer had been expensive, and I had yet to understand why. In total, one typo correction would cost us ten thousand dollars. As a bonus, though, we’d receive a crash course in the justice system, a civics class with armed bailiffs.
“And don’t call me Shirley,” I said, coming up behind him. We’d each taken a flight here to Dallas–Fort Worth and would be sharing the connecting flight to Arizona.
He set down Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, to my surprise; I was reading Red Mars, too. When I pulled my copy out to prove it, he shook his head. “Surely you can’t be serious,” he replied. “I don’t know, man, I’m not feeling good about this.”
Benjamin had called for a free consultation from another lawyer, who’d laughed, “You know the saying ‘Don’t make a federal case of it’? Well, the Park Service did.” The lawyer suggested that the outcome was set. The court had the blog’s admission of our deeds, so they had nothing to prove or disprove, no doubt of our guilt.
Benjamin said, “I mean, there’s no way we can even ask for an arbitration. We can’t go in there and say, ‘Gee, we had no freaking idea this thing mattered to anyone. It didn’t look like it would’—”
“I don’t think we want to say that to them,” I pointed out. I didn’t mention that since it was a criminal case, arbitration wasn’t an option anyway.
“—and we’d be happy to pay for repairs. Hey, we’ll scrape off the Wite-Out ourselves. And Jeff here’s proven he can do things that blend in well. He could repaint the apostrophe in the wrong spot if you really want it there. We should be able to sit down with someone and talk about it, right? Honest communication, cooperative problem-solving … something.”
“They’ve already decided that we are the problem.” I didn’t point out that our lack of communication—not asking permission—had led us here.
“This whole