The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [71]
When the Holiday Inn concierge handed me a map of the hotel, featuring a blaring typo in their near-nonsensical slogan (A FRONTIER OF IT’S OWN!), I barely even blinked. “How about that,” I said blandly to Jane, indicating the interloping apostrophe. “I’ll point it out to them later.” It was too late for much hunting, so we headed into a lively bar/meat market downtown and enjoyed great food and two-dollar local drafts, then retired to the hotel to play a rousing game of Phase 10. I drifted to sleep afterward with a sense of relief—I had learned to stop worrying and love the typos.
In the morning we returned to the downtown area, ready to track down errors now that businesses would be open. I saw by the light of day that Billings actually couldn’t boast all that much of a downtown, but there were a few shops and cafés available for our perusal. So we wandered, and soon enough I came across a typo, in a commemorative plate on display. It occurred in the middle of a paean to bears: “Be gentle enough to follow natures inspirations and be strong enough to make the world a better place.” To the left of the doggerel was a stoic and somewhat self-conscious ursine face.
“Look at that plate,” I said.
“What a bear, bear!” said Jane, clapping her hands. Even after she spotted the typo, her enthusiasm for a plate dedicated to her favorite animal could not be diminished. I thought, oh whatever, the manufacturer (American Expedition) won’t ever bother correcting this. I ought not to be a killjoy when the plate can still move bear enthusiasts like my TEAL companion.
Next we came upon a shop that carried, among other things, products by local artists. The proprietor came up to me with a warm smile and we exchanged pleasantries. As she chattered on, my eyes wandered to a display of framed poetry by Billings-area wordsmiths. There it was, buried in a poem about rural routes or something: “Our dusty road winds its’ way through sage …” Like Vancouver, Billings sure seemed to be having a problem with its itses. I opened my mouth to point out the typo to the nice lady in front of me … and I closed it again. I would say nothing. What tattered standard did I think to wave in the faces of the state’s honest citizens? I had only the grammatical snapshot of this mere moment in history to flaunt. The whole thing was pointless, as Jane had intimated. Thus spake, or didn’t spake, the newly minted Grammar Hippie. I snapped a quick picture of the poem and hurried out onto the street, Jane following me with a puzzled look.
“What happened?” she said outside.
I told her about the typo and my hesitation.
“I’m glad you didn’t say anything!” Jane asserted. “It’s a poem.”
“And?”
She squinted at me in the sunshine. “In poetry, language belongs to the poet. Would you go through e.e. cummings’s poems and add capitalization? Like Emily Dickinson’s old editor, removing all the dashes from her poems?”
Ouch. She had pierced right to the heart of the matter: I was presuming too much. The gentleman who’d come up with these verses was more poetaster than poet, but he still enjoyed citizenship in a country beyond the League’s jurisdiction. This had been obvious to Jane from the start. She was, now that I thought about it, the quintessential Grammar Hippie—not just due to her fondness for nonconfrontation, but because she recognized the mutable nature of truth. In my pre-League existence, if I complained to her about somebody knocking me over in a subway car, she would play devil’s advocate and suggest that the offender could have been having a bad day, or maybe he had bad eyesight. Jane understood that we are trapped within the cage of our own perceptions and biases. From