The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [115]
I needed the blog, partly for opening my thoughts to feedback from everyone who cared like I did, but also for writing out my thoughts in the first place. That’s the way my thought process worked best: text-based, writing and editing on the page.
As we worked to resurrect the website, reliving our typo memories one by one, I said, “For the second tour, we’ll include more people from the start.”
“Try to score corrections in all fifty states?” Benjamin suggested.
“That’s an idea,” I said. “But this time around, it’s going to be about more than just the corrections. It’ll be an Editor’s Quest. We’ll show everyone the marvels that can be wrought by simply taking a second look.”
“By the way,” said Benjamin, “you owe me at least one state on the Appalachian Trail. Keep some white space in your calendar for … 2011?”
I promised I would, then returned to my musings. The dimensions of the League’s possibility opened wide, straining against the tissue of my frontal lobes. After all our adventures and misadventures, I could picture multifarious, multifaceted destinies for TEAL—the push for Direct Instruction, yes, and another tour, but there were additional promising actions that we could carry out even sooner. As she’d offered more than a year ago, Jane could help me put together compelling games and videos on the Internet that would spread education in the same viral fashion that typos themselves often operated. By jingo, I could craft entire narrative worlds around the concepts we had learned, the issues we had stumbled upon, such as clarity’s vital role in communication and the importance of awareness, of patience and care. Everything that touched typos could be scaled out to universal proportions and eventually scaled back again, the way language itself functioned as both a tool and a bellwether of humanity. Like English itself, TEAL could swell its boundaries and encompass all that needed a place to belong.
We took a break from our website work and went on a walk around Somerville. Night had fallen. We wound up at the Prospect Hill castle, a monument built on the site where, on January 1, 1776, General George Washington raised the first flag of the thirteen colonies—in essence, the first American flag to fly anywhere across this land. The lights of Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston sparkled below us and before us in the darkness, a fabulous patchwork of gems that would not have made for a bad Rocks & Minerals spread. The tops of Boston’s highest towers disappeared into cloud.
“Quite a different view than what Washington must have seen,” Benjamin said, marveling at the electric panoply. Sirens sounded behind us somewhere in the thicket of Somerville streets. Beneath the parapet, homeless men mumbled and played in the trees.
“If you look straight ahead, you can see where I used to work at MIT.” I indicated a squat tower in the foreground of the river with a golf-ball-shaped atmospheric radome on top. “You know, once upon a time,” back when I’d felt like the only one stuck in place, surrounded by people with purpose. Then I’d headed to Hanover, where my classmates had roused me to action. Strange that by now they must have all heard that I was a criminal. I could finally laugh about it now: ten thousand dollars for a comma and an apostrophe. And we didn’t even get to keep them.
Contrary to what the Park Service thought about us, both Benjamin and I had a sharp interest in bygone times. My friend noted wryly that this castle had been built in 1903 to celebrate a historic site—the commemoration itself decades older than the supposed priceless artifact at the Grand Canyon. Still, while