The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [61]
The next day we powered on all the way to Portland. Jane was in my thoughts constantly now. Her arrival at the Seattle airport was not far away, so every mile brought me closer to her. Again we found ourselves on the road for about six hours, and didn’t get into town until evening. Josh had proven a doughty companion for the road, taking intermittent shifts at the wheel, which were crucial at times like this for meeting the demanding pace of the itinerary. I’m not sure whether this trek or that of the previous day took the technical cake for longest travel day of the TEAL trip. All I know is that the consecution of two epic slogs made for tired Leaguers. Nonetheless, soon after we checked into our hotel, my brother in error-sleuthing said, “Let’s hit the town!”
I remained in a state of collapse on my bed. “Can we do that from here?”
“Man up!” said Josh. “We only have two nights in Portland, and I intend to enjoy them.” He began to search online for the most succulent dinner and distinctive spirits in the neighborhood.
Yes, get out there, but forget grub, rebuked a voice in my head that sounded a lot like Benjamin. You haven’t done your hunt today.
I’m hungry, and beat, I argued back. Tomorrow would be fine. Before Josh, I had spent more than three weeks on the road with the real Benjamin, who possessed a whole-minded focus on the mission and relative disinterest in sightseeing and cuisine. Why shouldn’t I now follow Josh’s lead and allocate a little more time for enjoyment?
You’re on a daily mission, yo, said the haranguer, still in Benjamin masquerade. You should be … HUNTING!
Hunting for typos in the dark?
My internal interlocutor hesitated. You could have found some already today. That’s two days in a row of slacking.
Where? Where in the textless hills and vacant roads should I have gone looking? Was I supposed to conjure typos to fix from the insensate air, during all those lonely miles between San Francisco and here?
The voice did not respond, so I considered the argument won. Josh and I headed out for burgers at an independent brewery. We ate well there and everywhere else during our brief stay in Portland, including a great breakfast place that through the power of their pancakes could be forgiven for refusing to let me fix their chalkboard. It was feeling like a real live vacation. Still, I could not help but remember the chiding voice in my head, accusing me of dereliction.
Perhaps that was how I came to folly the next day. We met up with David Wolman, an enthusiast of the League whose book on the history of English spelling, Righting the Mother Tongue, would come out later that year (not to be confused with Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue, also a book about English language history). Wolman obviously had the same orthographic topics near to his own heart, but he expressed surprise upon meeting me that I wasn’t more of a hardliner. As a chronically poor speller, he’d suffered through countless indignities at the hands of unsympathetic schoolmarms and grammar cops. I wondered how he’d gotten the impression that I was like them; did I come off that way in the blog? As we chatted about wayward apostrophes and such at a bistro on Alberta Street, I mentioned a sign that I’d noticed on our way over, in the window of a restaurant closed for the day: “He was a bold man that first eat an oyster,” attributed to Jonathan Swift.
“I keep mulling it over,” I said. “Obviously grammatical syntax was not quite the same in Swift’s day, and yet it seems … wrong to me.”
Wolman agreed but could not be sure.
“Why don’t we look it up online?