The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [56]
“Thanks for everything, buddy,” I said. “I would never have made it this far without your help.”
“Oh,” he demurred, grasping my hand in a firm shake, “I’m sure you would have, geographically. But maybe not with a correction rate over fifty percent.”
A numbers man to the end, I thought. “Well, have a safe flight back,” I said. “And when you take your walk in the woods, stick to the path!”
“You get your ass up to Seattle—and Jane—in one piece,” said Benjamin, and he headed for the nearest subway station on the Boulevard.
I opened the car door, but then I heard, “Oh, and Deck …” So I turned.
Benjamin stood some distance away on the sidewalk, pointing a pen at me. “The League is in your hands now!” he called. “Make me proud.”
I saluted him with the Typo Correction Kit. Then he was gone, a champion off to new campaigns.
A few days later, first the Today piece and then the World News story aired. Josh and I didn’t have a TV at our hostel in San Luis Obispo, so I had to catch the ABC clip online the next morning. I sat on the quilted bedspread, eating a Pop-Tart and Googling my own name. Before clicking on the video of the piece, I read the text associated with it—and froze. The toaster pastry fell from my hand.
“Typo Eradication Assistance League?”
“Uh-oh,” Josh muttered.
The initial wave of stories about TEAL consisted largely of positive, sympathetic coverage, with equally positive reader response. We rejoiced in these pieces, seeing them as a confirmation that people besides us actually cared about the nits and grits of spelling and grammar. A few of the pieces strove for a deeper understanding of the mission, such as a story by the Chicago Tribune, which brought up the same dilemma of independent-store identity that I had fretted over in Santa Fe. However, something was missing from most of the stories about the League.
Our journey was, on the surface, simple. Man Drives Across U.S. Fixing Typos. There it is in six words. The what of the story is straightforward, which is probably what made it an attractive subject in the first place. The why of our story, however, is rather more complicated. Even we didn’t have a full grasp of that part, at least not yet. Thus, whenever media outlets tried, in truncated fashion, to address the reasons for our mission, the results were less than enlightening. The Today piece on TEAL opened with the anchor saying, “In today’s world of text messaging, odd abbreviations take the place of actually spelling out a word, so some would argue it’s actually helped many of us forget the rules of the English language.”
The blame-it-on-texts meme also popped up in the Seattle Times, the Virginian-Pilot, the Albany Times-Union (quoting a local English teacher), the Nashua Telegraph, the Longmont Times-Call, and London’s Guardian (“the barbarous neologisms of text-speak”), though I said not a word about texting in my interviews. It was a general, unexamined answer for why modern spelling often falters—easy, pithy, and therefore useful.* Note the Today anchor’s use of that slippery word some. “Some would argue” that texting is destroying English. Nobody specific is actually mentioned here, so the viewer would have to assume that it’s common knowledge, and even that we Leaguers had undertaken our trip for that reason. Jack Shafer, Slate magazine’s curmudgeonly media critic, classifies some, along with many, few, often, seems, likely, and more, as “weasel-words,” a favorite tool of journalists “who haven’t found the data to support their argument.”
Blaming spelling errors on cell-phone argot is silly enough. We veer painfully close to the aching borderlands of irony, though, when there are errors in stories about guys fixing errors. Coverage of our mission included a bushel of outright mistakes, all of which could have easily been