The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [68]
Then something else occurred to me. I’d gotten used to hashing these kinds of things out with my old buddy Benjamin, echoing the dialectic rhythms of our days as roommates, but somehow I’d failed to solicit help from the one closest to me. Here Jane had come all this way to join me in my crazy mission, even now giving me a rest from the wheel, yet she hadn’t been included. She’d done her Jane thing of being there for everyone else without voicing her opinion. I suspected that I hadn’t asked her to voice one because I thought I knew what she’d say, and it wouldn’t be what I wanted to hear. “Jane?”
“Uh-huh?”
“What do you think makes double-a Isaac more ‘correct’ than double-s Issac?” I asked.
Jane had gone into a kind of trance herself; now she lowered her speed from ninety-five miles per hour to a more reasonable ninety. “Mmmm, I don’t think it is, necessarily. I mean, whatever the guy’s name is, that’s his name, so if someone else writes it down wrong, then bzzzt—wrong answer. But I don’t think one’s better than another.”
“So … what about words that aren’t someone’s name? Where there’s no one person to decide the right version.”
Jane shrugged. I waited her out, and she smiled one of those self-conscious smiles that comes from knowing someone’s staring at you. I certainly wasn’t going anywhere. “Um, okay. Well, to be honest, that’s why I don’t really see the point of your mission, Jeffs. Who’s to say what spelling is right, if the version that you’re insisting on is historically as arbitrary as the ‘typo’ version?”
That had been harder than I’d expected—on me. I didn’t want to argue against her, but rather, explain my position, since she’d so carefully mentioned that she didn’t see the point. “It’s … it’s still important to make the distinction,” I said. “Because we all have to agree on one of the versions. For clarity.”
She gave me a doubtful look. “Clarity. Uh-huh. Would anyone not get that Issac was supposed to be Isaac? Would it affect their comprehension of that sign? I know that stuff like that will always bug you, because you know how the dictionary would spell it. But as long as everybody basically understands each other, then dang, what’s the problem?” She patted my leg to take the edge off dang, which was strong language for her. “When you’re writing the code for a computer program, you can potentially make a few different kinds of errors. Run-time errors will cause bad glitches or freezes, and compilation errors prevent the program from even running in the first place. Logic errors, on the other hand, aren’t as bad—they can at least get through the compiler. You’ll get some funky results, but … I feel like these typos are little logic errors. Not enough to crash the program. If people started walking into walls when they saw a typo, going bonk, bonk, bonk—” Here her pantomime would have been more amusing and perhaps adorable if we had not been traveling at our current speed with her behind the wheel. “If people were having real problems with typos, I guess I’d understand better why I only get to see my bear for one week out of three whole months.”
Like a deftly coded function, Jane had returned