The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [59]
We headed back to their car, where we saw that the correspondent had fallen asleep, his face pressed against the window. The cameraman took some optional footage of this, and we all headed to their hotel’s bar. I enjoyed three rum-and-Cokes on the BBC and inwardly toasted Benjamin with his favorite drink.
In the morning I did an interview with a Minnesota Public Radio show called Grammar Grater, which assembles thoughtful weekly episodes on spelling and grammar. My confidence on air had power-leveled since the NPR stutterfest on the second day of the trip. Of course, I could also credit my alertness in the interview to the coarse wakeup of the morning’s previous interview, with a pair of Iowan shock jocks (though, how shocking could they be, interviewing a grammarian?). As the style of my interviewers swung from fart jokes to engaged questions, I could see the contradictory forces yanking at the public over the airwaves, some daring to offer us insight, some quailing to go near such a thing. I couldn’t have guessed that an altogether different tug-of-war lay in store for my mission, with ropes taut and combatants ready to pull.
TYPO TRIP TALLY
Total found: 183
Total corrected: 104
* Hopefully, informed debunkings such as David Crystal’s recent Txtng: The Gr8 Deb8 will finally lay this myth to rest.
* Six-fifty an hour, as I recall from my intern days.
12 | You Got a Friend
April 12–17, 2008 (San Francisco, CA, to Vancouver, BC)
As they round the treacherous curves of the PCH, our Hero and his new firebrand companion do great Deeds in the name of their mother Tongue. Yet all is not well. There is a traitor among them, and a frightening revelation, in the manner of an evil Chicken, is coming home to roost in the head of our Hero.
Josh cracked San Francisco open like a mussel, seeking the sweet creature within. He did the same with every city on our itinerary, but this, the jubilant locus of northern California, came the closest to satisfying his voracity for new experiences and sights and craft beers. His wide-ranging enthusiasm helped to revive me somewhat from the travel-weariness I felt at this point. Without Josh, I would not have ventured into the recondite shops of Haight-Ashbury, would not have encountered the drugged-out denizens of Golden Gate Park, would not have sampled the city’s finest Vietnamese and Mexican, nor its nonfigurative and quite tasty mussels themselves. Nor would I have wound up at the Cartoon Art Museum, concealed in the financial district’s thicket of towers.
At the time of our visit, the museum featured an exhibit on “Sex and Sensibility,” profiling ten female cartoonists and their work. What a splendid way, I thought, to honor some of the lesser-known players in the comics game, artists and writers and humorists who deserved more recognition for their talent. Then I started reading the biographical plaques—and the fires of righteous fury licked at the periphery of my vision.
It was a whole gallery of errors. They ranged from relatively minor mistyping (“… raised in one of he lesser parts of the greater Chicago area,” “Her father often said in is jovial way …”) to words that were garbled (“I admit I became kind of a bif fishas flounder of Kirshenbaum …”) to places in the text where it appeared that whole words or even phrases were missing (“Interestingly, while she did not have a favorite Beatle, she did have a minute-and-a-half and then went on to work at numerous jobs …,” “I always loved to draw and really loved in a cartoony way”). There were mistakes littering every one of the ten biographies.
Josh shook his head upon seeing the errors. “To think we paid six bucks a head to see this,” he said, disgusted. With stunning ease, he shed his tourist mantle, and his New Yorker aggression kicked in. “Let’s go tell them right now. Let’s make sure they fix every single typo!”
“In the name of the