The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [43]
My new cowboy hat became the only thing keeping my skull intact as my mind exploded outward with the force of the revelations. I rewound myself back to the bookstore, understood what I’d missed there, and kept going. Back to Austin and New Orleans, back again to Alabama and the Carolinas, all the way to my first miserable typo-hunting excursion in Boston. Then I snapped back into the present moment like a rubber band. I’d apparently gotten in line with Benjamin at a humble fajita stand at the corner of the main square. The line moved fast, and we scored ourselves some sizzling food and lemonade, found a park bench, and enjoyed our repast. As if mirroring my mental overload, my taste buds bloomed in full thanks to a sensational rain of flavors. Benjamin handed over half of the ample stack of napkins we’d been given, tons of extras for the nose-blowing that unacclimated consumers would require; the well-spiced fajitas had opened our sinuses to breathe in the world. We kept pausing between bites to mutter our astonishment before blowing our noses and resuming stuffing ourselves with the food.
Benjamin leaned back on the bench. “Dude, I don’t think I’m ever eating at a Taco Bell again. Fast food seems somehow offensive now.”
I took a deep breath, putting down my empty wrapper. “Um. I have to tell you something.”
We’d had trouble from the start finding the most fertile typo-hunting ground, but a pattern had emerged, and here in Santa Fe, it crystallized for me. The more homogenized a place became, the less likely we’d be to find typos. “Filene’s Basement was a fluke,” I explained, and Benjamin agreed. Most signs coming from corporate would have been checked for problems before thousands of copies were made. The bigger the company, the more widespread would be the single error that got through and thus the more they’d want to avoid that. “Owners expense” aside—and that didn’t belong to corporate America anyhow—we’d found many more typos on individually made signs, the ones run off quickly in the store’s back office.
Benjamin summed things up. “Okay, so the more independently owned shops you have, the more typos we’re likely to find. So now we know where to go.”
Yes, but no—he didn’t get it. He didn’t see the significance. “But I like these places better!”
“So do I. The whole real America thing isn’t about urban versus rural; it’s identity versus … Walmart.”
I stood up, clenching my fists. Yes, yes, valid point, but still. “Benjamin, I—” I didn’t know what I meant, or maybe I didn’t want to vocalize it, but I flailed in a mental whirlpool, and I had to face the fact that my mission could be a mistake. It’d been impossible to know it when I started out, but the standards I graded on were flunking the wrong people. The soulless, concrete wastelands of strip malls and big-box stores that all sold the same stuff, I gave a clean bill of grammatical health, and then I came to these places, these living last bastions of independent thought and color and energy, and I corrected them. “Are we—am I—Look. What if typos are an element of this kind of setting?” I spread my hands out wide, as if to encompass all of Santa Fe, offering it a ride upon my shoulders like Atlas’s burden. “Am I destroying a part of its character? What if I’m an agent of the very homogenization I despise, waltzing into town and demanding that everyone stick to our rigid grammatical standard, helping corporate agents claim these idylls by ‘cleaning up’ the language like a new high-rise ‘cleans up’ the area by evicting the poorer tenants?”
“Whoa!” Benjamin cut me short. “Dude, no smoking our dogs aloud. Calm down.”
He had a point. I took a deep breath. Then he suggested that while it wasn’t a bad idea to ask these hard questions, I didn’t have to give up immediately. I hadn’t explicitly suggested that, but he was right that I’d considered stopping the typo hunt right there on that square. It seemed like a perfect moment for true reckoning, that I could look back and say, “A fajita opened my sinuses and then Santa