The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [67]
“This is a classic screwup,” I muttered. “So many people mix up the s and the a. Could be that the double a feels unnatural to modern English speakers. I remember back in junior high, one of my classmates—who would go on to become valedictorian, no less—proudly showed me the glossy cover that he’d designed for his report for science class, and there it was. ‘Issac Newton.’ Even back then, it jumped out at me as wrong.”
Something more interesting had caught Jane’s attention during this musing, a pretty bird or the sun glinting off the surface of the water, but now she nodded and took a look at the sign again. “Well,” she said, “keep this in mind: if Washington State was still a territory when this guy was around, it had to be a while ago.”
“True.”
“Could he have spelled his name that way? It could have been a variation on the name back then.”
At first this rationale struck me as suspiciously similar to the one that a park ranger had trotted out for me back at a reconstruction of an old mining town in the southern California desert. One store had promised STATIONARY on its marquee, clearly intended to be an advertisement for its goods and not an indicator of its mobility or lack thereof. When I brought the sign up to the ranger, he had said dismissively, “That must be how they spelled ‘stationery’ back in the Old West.” That had been mere days after “St. Frances of Assissi,” the so-called Spanish spelling. Apathy masqueraded as an awareness of language change and divergence. Granted, names could change their spellings over time. My own first name is an update of the Old English name Geoffrey (e.g., that lewd rascal Chaucer). In this case, though, sorry—they didn’t spell it like that back then. Here, I already knew that Sir Isaac Newton, whose birth had preceded Governor Stevens’s by a couple of centuries, was an Isaac, thus I knew that “Issac” was not historically the norm. Or, of course, I could look further back, to the biblical origin of the name, and at least by the King James translation, he was a double-a-not-double-s kind of kid.
But hold on—Jane had suggested that it might have once been a variation, not the standard, and that was entirely possible. In the next state over, Montana, visitors to Glacier National Park could stay at the Izaak Walton Inn, named in honor of a seventeenth-century fisherman. Today you can find all sorts of mad alternate spellings of names not long ago regarded as canon, such as Michael (Micheal, Michale—or Makayla for girls). Probably at least a few Issacs roamed the nation at this very moment. What I had to figure out was whether this Issac, Governor Stevens of the Territory of Washington, had actually been an Issac. I suspected he wasn’t, but Josh wasn’t around to confirm this via his handy-dandy traveling Internet, which I also wasn’t willing to put full faith in since the Jonathan Swift botch in Portland. I said to Jane that she could be right, and we soon got back on the road to press on to Montana.
I thought about the Issac-Isaac question all day, though, and even verifying later on the Internet that, yes, the late Governor Stevens did go by Isaac did nothing to quell my growing unease. I became irritable. That night, after the kids at the Missoula Pita Pit botched our order, I savaged them in the blog, both for their poor customer service and the fact that they worked in a place with HER’S written on the bathroom door. Jane got irritable at my irritability, and we skipped our customary evening session of the popular card game Phase 10 and went to bed.
Jane and I endured some long, desolate drives on our journey through the northern Great Plains, and the road from Missoula to Billings was no exception. Indigo mountains were nice, rolling