The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [64]
How did we get here? First I had to take a hard look at the siege engine I had set grinding toward the citadel of English. What was the League about, really? Not the idealized form in my head, but its literally stated goals, and our practices in carrying them out. The original mission statement read, in part:
[S]lowly the once-unassailable foundations of spelling are crumbling, and the time has come for the crisis to be addressed. We believe that only through working together with vigilance and a love of correctness can we achieve the beauty of a typo-free society.
There was no room for subtlety or individual expression in those words. It was a call to war. I had created a dread automaton that chugged along according to inexpertly programmed instructions. I could see now how in line Josh was with our mission according to its very definition. As in every other aspect of his journey, he had jumped into typo hunting with surpassing vigor. He had overfixed the chalkboard because that meant extra points, giving a 110 percent effort to the mission. Josh wasn’t the traitor to the cause. I was.
No wonder I had gotten so many puzzlingly fanatical comments on the blog from people who decried the decline of America through bad spelling, who wanted me to correct the way that people talked as well as the way that they wrote. No wonder Wolman had assumed that I’d be a hardliner until he’d met me. The League was carrying out the dream of hardliners everywhere. That wasn’t what I’d intended at all. I had sought to overstate things a bit in the mission statement, to recognize through self-parodying pomposity that my journey bordered on the absurd; e.g., referring to typos as “vile stains on the delicate fabric of our language.” I hadn’t expected anyone to nod gravely at my words, missing the hyperbole.
Josh’s approach to YOU GOT A FRIEND IN BOOZE was perfectly consistent with his previous actions. He had displayed a straightforward approach to typo hunting from the start. Back in L.A., when I’d pointed out a fuel pump label that said HARMFUL OR FATAL IS SWALLOWED, he was unimpressed until I went around and corrected each instance of the error on all seven pumps. It was a concrete task for him, a checklist in which each box must be filled in completely with a No. 2 pencil. Fix every occurrence, change every wrong into right, and then you can have your beer. Upon noticing how often we ran into “owners expense” signs, Josh proclaimed them the “bread and butter of TEAL,” seeing each instance as basically another job to be done. Now I realized the implications of this functional approach to language: Josh was a prescriptivist.
The popular perception of English-y folks, or language nerds, is that we are a fairly monolithic group of preposition-obsessed finger-waggers. But bitter ideological divides are a characteristic of every field of interest, and spelling and grammar are no exception. O how the fires of battle rage between the two camps of dogma! To all those who ordinarily give change junctions no more than a passing thought—beware!
The Prescriptivist is typified by Lynne Truss and the Old Guard of English conventions, columnists in the tradition of William Safire, and many language-based humorists. Call this one the Grammar Hawk. The Hawk swings and punches in the cause of linguistic tradition, i.e., the way that we’ve habitually been spelling and punctuating words for a long time. The philosophy here is that there is one proper way to go about orthography, and one way only: what the dictionary and grammar textbooks instruct us to do. These are the standards that have arisen from consensus and that provide the greatest clarity in writing. The Hawk tells people how they should spell.
The Descriptivist represents most academics (linguists, English professors, cognitive scientists) and dictionary staff. We can call him the Grammar Hippie, for he advocates a passive, observational approach to spelling and grammar. The Hippie merely notes