The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [28]
I had great hopes of seeing more significantly historical—and fun—things when we got to Mobile on that St. Paddy’s afternoon. My guidebook mentioned the World War II battleship USS Alabama and submarine USS Drum, as well as other tourism focused around instruments of war. Yet the need to visit a mall lay heavy upon me. Immediately after checking in at our latest Econo Lodge, we struck out for the nearest shopping behemoth. There we viewed a familiar roster, the exact same stores we could find in our own home cities—and anywhere else one happened to roam.
“I hope they have Dippin’ Dots,” Benjamin said as we entered through Dillards. “I have a hankerin’.”
We hadn’t trodden far into the mall when we came upon an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking,* and though this concession stand held no dots for dippin’, we stopped to look over the assorted snacks. There, on a candy cooker, I found a sign that stirred only my hunger for grammatical clarity: CAUTION: DO NOT TOUCH VERY HOT!
What’s the sound you make that indicates a period? Or a semicolon? Whereas the rest of written language is supposed to correspond to the oral form directly;* punctuation doesn’t seem to fill in for any sound at all. No, it indicates the spaces in between, and that’s a relatively new invention, but one that we’ve stuck with since the mass production of books became possible. Printer Aldus Manutius is credited with creating our modern system of punctuation, though his marks have migrated downward on the line and gotten smaller and subtler (the way the indicator of a pause should be). He created them for the very reason you originally learned to use the comma wherever you’d pause: to give writing speech effects. A period’s utility is immediately obvious it marks the completion of each thought think how difficult it would be if we didn’t have those to tell us where one ended and the next began that would make reading a much more stressful task. The comma’s helpfulness is more understated, but it has the same effect of aiding the reader in breaking a full thought up into pieces, offering us pause-points between each segment.
In this case (CAUTION: DO NOT TOUCH VERY HOT!), any one of several different marks after TOUCH would fill the bill. Traditional grammar might favor a colon: the directive DO NOT TOUCH is followed by a clarification of why touching is not desirable, much as this very clause clarifies why a colon would work in the sign. Given that there’s already a colon after CAUTION, though, a dash might be better—to emphasize the very hotness! A period or exclamation point would break the two parts into separate sentences, though VERY HOT doesn’t make for much of a sentence, lacking both a subject and verb. Personally, I could find room in my heart for a semicolon, that old benchwarmer of the punctuative ball club, or even a comma. Just to have something there, to plug the yawning absence that currently confused the warning. The girl behind the counter—or rather, enclosed within it—had been cavorting with a young suitor and only took notice of us when we’d remained stationary for a long moment.
“Oh, don’t mind us,” Benjamin said. “We’re crossing the country correcting typos.”
She laughed. “All right.”
“See, it says ‘DO NOT TOUCH VERY HOT!’” I said. “But without a dash or colon or anything, the meaning is confused.”
“Like, they don’t know what not to touch,” said Benjamin.
“They’re looking for the Very Hot. And they can’t find it.”
“They say, ‘Yeah, I can’t touch the Very Hot, but I can touch everything else.’”
“It’s like a ‘Don’t tease