The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [12]
After my appointment, I headed for Back Bay, choosing a path along Boylston Street, under the upthrust of the city’s twin spires, the Prudential and Hancock towers. Today, as usual, moderately well-off shoppers bustled across the Boston thoroughfare, popping into its chain apparel stores and grabbing a bite to eat at pseudo-Italian cafés. The mild weather had put complacent smiles on many faces, including my own. I weaved through various stores, but I found precious little signage to inspect in many of them. I began to wonder if my mother’s fretting had been more sensible than I’d realized. Sure, I thought I saw typos all the time, but now that I was seeking them out, maybe they wouldn’t turn out to be so numerous.
Then the East Coast’s favorite bargain clothing store, Filene’s Basement, rebuked that thought with near-biblical force. As any decent otherworldly omen should, the typo appeared above me: MENS CONTEMPORARY. And below it … MENS’ BOXED TIES! Two varieties of error on the same word. I’d had a suspicion during the birth of the League that apostrophes would turn out to be a problem area for people.
Then the doubting raven’s dread prophecy came to pass: I walked on out of the store without saying anything, leaving the blasphemous MENS hanging in my wake. Men is already plural! You can’t put the s on without the apostrophe, that’s simply wrong, but that wrong I could not work up the nerve to right. I didn’t know how. Stealth was the strategy that appealed to my present cowardice, but this one hovered too high for that to be tactically feasible. I didn’t know whom to ask, or how. Yes, the struggle for grammatical uprightness begins not on the printed page, but in the soul. Caught under the piercing glare of that errant sign, I conjured every excuse I could fathom. The common sales clerk wouldn’t care enough to hear me out to the end of a sentence, right? Oh, and that one passing by seems busy with something else. Even the appearance of the sign seemed reason not to interfere; if not for the grammatical chicanery, a shopper could consider these signs professionally wrought. How could I possibly get anyone to heed my call for justice? Why, again, had I chosen to embark upon this insane trip?
Though not accosting anyone did eventually turn out to be a prudent choice, I concluded that day’s blog with a note of defeat, scolding myself for having made such vaunted plans and then retreated so easily. I felt I’d joined the ranks of truly miserable failures, falling somewhere between the impotent strivings of Wile E. Coyote and Michael “Brownie” Brown’s FEMA. I didn’t even count the MENS’ BOXED TIES as an official typo find, since those signs seemed to have come as a set. The tally for my early days of hunting came to a mere three typos, only one of which I’d corrected—the one hidden in my bathroom, which I’d meant to be a warm-up. The spirit of TEAL focused on text directed toward many people, words that were open and asking to be read and reread by the masses. My bathroom received far too few visitors to meet those standards.
Tuesday morning, on a break from packing, I made a quick trip into CVS. After yesterday’s debacle, I didn’t have the heart to go out typo hunting, and so I made the mistake of leaving home without my corrective supplies. Of course, just as neglecting one’s umbrella acts as a dare to the storm gods, my oversight ensured that I’d stumble onto quarry—a tchotchke featuring an apostrophe for a plural: PINA COLADA’S. I snapped a crude picture with my camera phone. I should have known that I couldn’t turn my heightened senses off, or even down to a simmer. O Weird Sisters, O Fates, you had stricken me with a typo in the very store where I’d purchased my elixir of correction! Something in me awakened then, and I loosed a growl of outrage at punctuation used in error. I tore off a corner of the label sticker from some nearby mouthwash, big enough to plant over the needless apostrophe. Without consciously deciding