The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [54]
Afterward, I conferred with the correspondent, the producer, and the cameraman. How was that for visual? Did the spectacle through the window meet with their approval? For that was what I now craved.
Well, they said. It was OK, it was visual, but perhaps still lacked zest, verve, a fresh and clean feeling. Could I be a shade more daring?
Benjamin, Josh, and I nodded. We would push back the brushy frontiers of typo hunting. There were certain zones that we had previously feared to tread. We corrected mistakes in a tattoo and piercing parlor, where the proprietor was happy to concede to the producer’s requests, albeit with a sardonic smile. I reached up to make the minimum required fix to a sign reading WE DONT CARE!! HOW MUCH YOUR HOMIE CAN DO IT 4!!! We stalked the aisles of an army surplus store, where a sign for a HELLICOPTER HELMET didn’t mean to imply that none but infernal pilots could wear it. Both places I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to police without my attendant platoon. Here, again, the camera crew had given me a strange kind of access or influence. Though there were always trade-offs. For every typo I gained thanks to them, there’d be another I’d lose somewhere else, at a business run by camera-shy folks. It was like reciting a poem through a bullhorn.
The ABC crew wrapped its footage of our corrections with their money shot: me adding the apostrophe to TODAYS SPECIAL, which was painted on the front window of a café. The cameraman ran back and forth through the doorway to film the action from both sides of the glass. After they had us take a couple of spins around the block in Callie so they could get driving shots, the first day of ordeals came to an end. I felt exhausted by the combination of typo hunting and pretending to be an interesting, photogenic person. As I calculated the day’s reckoning for the blog that night, I was astonished to find that we had netted an incredible total of seventeen typos found, nine of which we were able to correct. In other words, the single most productive day of the entire trip. Still, I couldn’t help but feel ambivalent about the whole thing. I was glad that the League’s mission would have high-profile coverage, but I also recoiled from the mechanism of the filming. It wasn’t so much that I minded playing the clown prince of correction—more that it had felt less personal and more antagonistic than ordinary TEAL practice. When a camera trails you like an unblinking henchman, your interactions with others automatically become more about you than anything else, stunts rather than meaningful conversations. We’d never intended to follow the model of Sacha Baron Cohen.
There had been a moment, fortunately, that clarified our motives and would appear in the actual piece, during a walk-and-talk that I did with the correspondent.
“You’re very nice about it,” he pointed out.
“It’s not about making anybody feel bad, or, uh, or, uh, making somebody look stupid or something, it’s just really about going after the errors themselves,” said I with typical eloquence. This stance genuinely seemed to surprise him, as it contrasted with the unsympathetic, commas-and-brimstone temperament of most high-profile grammarians and sticklers. If viewers could take away that message—that blame should have no place in spelling and grammar—then our appearance would have been well worth the trouble.
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