The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [65]
I hadn’t thought about this conflict much when starting out on the mission—I’d been focused on my own personal interpretation of what typos were, of when to consider something an error. Now that I was forced to examine it, typo hunting looked completely antithetical to Grammar Hippie beliefs, but I didn’t feel comfortable with the pure Grammar Hawk approach, either. Black and white could not by themselves paint the complex portrait of American English. (Or rather, North American English, here in the dark streets of Vancouver.) Ideally, people would see the nuances, would recognize that something like lonley would never be right, but that they were free to bend their speech to a certain degree in the service of dialect and individual character, that indeed such practices were healthy and necessary to the ongoing evolution of a language. However, everyone ended up choosing one side or the other, donning either the feathers of the Hawk or the tie-dye of the Hippie.
Even the triumph of the Cartoon Art Museum corrections seemed sour now, considering the mass bullying it had taken to get anything done. I’d needed to resort to an unsubtle, Hawklike maneuver; I couldn’t imagine marshaling the troops on a regular basis. For a moment I feared that TEAL’s entire mission was misguided on some fundamental level—or even futile, like flinging thimblefuls of water onto a beached whale. One typo correction at a time hardly seemed an adequate pace for bringing about a better world.
Coming back to the present, where Josh still fixed me with challenging eyes, I capitulated. I let the hated ’ve stand on the sign, and we moved on. We grabbed some mediocre Japanese food and headed back to the hotel, and I spent a restless night thinking about what I’d become.
Before departing the next day, Josh wanted to buy some Canadian beer to bring back with us across the border. The shop we chose turned out to be overpriced, but that was not its sole failing: one sign proclaimed a particular vintage A DELIGHTFUL WINE JUST TO SIP ON IT’S OWN.
That morning, I’d seen a restaurant marquee promising GREEK FOOD AT IT’S BEST. I was beginning to think that Canadians had as much trouble with the its/it’s thing as Americans. But who could blame them? Its/it’s confusion is one of the most common and pervasive types of errors in modern English. We’re taught that apostrophes go with possessives like fish with chips, and so when making it possessive, the natural choice is to add that obligatory apostrophe. Oh, but our instincts betray us! Its is different thanks to its status as a pronoun, much like his or her (e.g., Josh Roberts at his best). It’s can only mean it is. The apostrophe’s dual role as both possessive-maker and contraction-maker causes a conflict of interest here, which nineteenth-century printers did not adequately take into account when cementing apostrophe rules in the first place. The distinction is stupid and arbitrary, yes, and until someone comes up with a better idea, we can at least take comfort from knowing that it’s the fault of long-dead printers and not us.
All three members of the liquor store staff were watching me with cold and suspicious eyes. One of them approached and asked if she could help me. I told her that she could, actually, and pointed out the it’s.
Her reaction was frosty. “Does it really matter?”
“It does,” I said. I held back from explaining the mission, from elaborating beyond those simple two words. Suddenly I didn’t feel like identifying myself by the greater scale of my efforts. I didn’t want to be a Grammar Hawk in her eyes. “Do you mind if I fix it? I can just make the s bigger to absorb the apostrophe.”
“No,