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Only with the publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755, less than three hundred years ago, did the dictionary move from mere reference to being regarded as the central authority. As Seth Lerer points out in his book Inventing English, Johnson’s baby “created the public idea of the dictionary as the arbiter of language use.” Dr. Johnson had high hopes of being able to fix the language into a single solid and stable form. But the eight-year task of being the sole arbiter, navigating among regional variations and the abundance of spellings for difficult words, without a pole star (or more than the barest twinkling of phonetic principles) to guide his many decisions, eventually mellowed him from being a strict, self-made Hawk to taking on decidedly Grammar Hippie tendencies. Quotations from well-known sources littered the dictionary, backing up the choices he’d made, as if to direct attention away from his role as the decision-maker.* He ended up admitting in the preface that his purpose had become “not to form, but register the language; not to teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts” (quoted in Lerer’s book). That’s the Hawk-versus-Hippie dilemma crystallized.

The scenery rolled on. Jane yelped in delight and jabbed her finger at my window. “Look over there! Buffalo!”

I saw them, brown shaggy blots on a hill. “Yeah. Buffalo.” I slouched further in my seat, staring at the dashboard. Taped to it was a yellowed sign that Josh had bought for me in San Francisco, at a pirate supply store: IF DECK IS SALTY, THERE WILL BE LASHINGS. She saw me looking at it.

“You’re a salty bear right now, huh? Does that mean you’re lashing me to the roof for the rest of the trip? It’s okay. You know how I like fresh air.” When I didn’t laugh heartily enough, she knew I was still lashed to the mast of some stubborn mental frigate. “Aww, come on, I didn’t mean to say that your mission’s pointless. You’ve made a lot of people happy by fixing their signs. You have even more people cheering you on every day in the blog.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Good!” She brightened. “Hey, I should be making more corrections, right? I’ve only done a couple so far. When we’re in Billings, you tell me when you find one, and I’ll grab the Wite-Out. You point, I correct!”

“Deal,” I replied, though I wondered if I’d even bother pointing them out for correction. Battered by my own adventures in language investigation over the course of the last month and a half, I felt like weary Samuel Johnson, though with considerably less to show for my efforts. If English is ever-changing and ever-mutating, if no pure form exists and never existed in the first place, then what was I doing? I found that I’d never discovered a satisfactory answer and could no longer sail full speed ahead without one. I had set out to protect the language from errors born of both carelessness and ineducation, but now I didn’t quite understand the creature I had taken as my ward. It wriggled to get away from me, it twisted and eeled.

Perhaps, I thought, what I regarded as typos were not “mistakes” at all—they were part of the natural evolution of English. How could I know how the speakers of my native tongue would spell a hundred years from now? They’d alight from their potato-fueled urban gliders and laugh at my present efforts. “Check this out—back in 2008, there was a guy who wasted his time on apostrophes! Im sure glad we aint usin those anymore.” Was I standing in the way of an inevitable, continual, necessary transformation? I felt like I was trying to guard the tides from the moon. Grammar Hawks had erred in regarding English as a fixed, carefully sculpted entity—in other words, treating it like Latin.* An on-the-ground, vernacular language simply behaves in different ways from a rarefied and static tongue. Now I had to face the possibility that the mission of the Typo Eradication Advancement League was as outmoded as … well, Latin.

We finally trundled into Billings that