The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [24]
“Uh, so …” Benjamin stumbled. Was the cousin going to fix it? Was it an idiot cousin who always made a mess of whatever she touched? Had that been a buck-passing maneuver so subtle we’d completely missed it?
I decided it was best to ignore the response completely, treat it as a non sequitur, and begin again. “It’s just there are a couple of words misspelled.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” she said.
No, it wasn’t. I didn’t think I would be able to convince her of that, though. Of course, my customary line at this point in the conversation would have normally been that I could fix it no sweat Sally, but without the right kind of tool—a plague upon the permanence of mine markers!—I couldn’t do anything without marring the sign. Benjamin looked toward me expectantly. “It’d be an easy fix, and if you’ve got a dry-erase marker …”
“Nope. My cousin did those signs. At home.”
The one gap in their bountiful inventory! “Uh, if I came back with a dry-erase marker …”
Ha, now she was the one thrown off.
“Right,” Benjamin added.
“Right,” I said. “So we’ll grab a dry-erase marker somewhere, and then we’ll come back.”
“Oh … kay?” she said as we spun toward the red rubber stairs.
Now we sought not only typos but a shop that might sell a dry-erase marker or two. We passed by groaning kiosks of purses and wallets, hats for every occasion (even pay-by-the-letter designer hats—I considered a TEAL hat, but they didn’t have them in teal), and assortments of items labeled “gifts” since you wouldn’t need any of those things yourself. We saw shirts and shoes and women’s accessories (no glitter was spared) and art and more clothes, but in spite of the wide, wild assortment of everything you never knew you desired, we couldn’t find the one thing we wanted to buy.
We halted at a mid-mall clothing stand that featured dozens of locally designed Barack Obama T-shirts. We might not have noticed the mistake therein had it not been for our unwavering support of Obama, who was currently squaring off against Senator Clinton in a drawn-out Democratic presidential primary. As we perused the homemade wares, a typo on one shirt knocked us out of shopping mode and back into typo-correction territory.
Speaking of territory. Typo correcting can be awkward enough, but this one offered an altogether new brand of discomfort. I read it aloud: “He’s black, and Im proud.” We looked at each other, and then took another look at our surroundings. Not that we’d been oblivious of the absolute lack of other white people until this moment; it simply hadn’t been a relevant factor in the equation until now.
I could see the question on Benjamin’s face. Were we two white kids going to approach this nice black lady and criticize, in even a small way, this shirt that advocated pride in the most significant black public figure in decades?
Yes. We were. The whole point of typo correcting is that it’s a subcategory of a larger goal to improve communication. Could we back down from typo correcting when the perceived communication obstacles grew too large? We couldn’t, and we wouldn’t—the ideals of the League demanded that we summon our courage. This typo of all typos, here in the epicenter of a hundred and fifty years’ worth of racial clashes and tragedies, demanded redress. If we’d acted differently than usual, then that would have been, perhaps, racist. Our hesitation highlighted a crucial characteristic of racial tension within our generation: blacks and whites may not fear each other the way they once did, back when slavers owned Atlanta or bigots felled Dr. King, or even as recently as the Rodney King riots, but we do fear the awkwardness of failed communication attempts. The progress made by our parents’ generation gave us necessary social proscriptions against racism. But now we have the tendency to self-censor, to be overly delicate with the words we’re using. The irony here is that the fear of saying the wrong thing has focused us too much on how and not enough on what we’re saying. Speaking correctly has become more important than the substance