The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [72]
In language, as in life, we cling to what we were taught and what we have always done, making it difficult not just to understand the quirks and seeming peccadilloes of others, but to relinquish beliefs that have become outmoded. If I saw a sign that said ice tea instead of iced tea, I’d judge it as a mistake. But ice cream started off as iced cream. So many people left off the hard-to-enunciate d when spelling the word that it eventually disappeared. Whether I like it or not, ice tea might be vindicated someday by a shift in spelling norms. Why, then, should I sweat small distinctions that may eventually prove irrelevant? I had plenty of reasons to rejoice in our language. We speak, and write, in one of the most diverse, gloriously ecumenical tongues on the planet. In English, there is a word or phrase for pretty much anything we want to say, and if there isn’t, we make it up, and it is welcomed into the family. We can express ourselves as complexly or as simply as we like. We can be magniloquent didacts, or we can talk plain.
A pretty realization, so why did I feel empty?
Billings would be, in retrospect, a time of tranquillity. Soon after we left, Jane and I faced no end of traveler’s woes. Snow drifted down from the grayness, thickening gradually. By the time we crossed into Wyoming, we found ourselves cutting through a full-fledged storm. This was right around when Callie began to demand service for her engine, for the first time since the Southeast. We lost two and a half hours to car repairs in Sheridan, and all the while snow fell in sheets. We didn’t roll into Rapid City until almost nine o’clock at night. Here it was Authority’s turn to rebel, steering us amiss and leading us to a darkened mall instead of our hotel. Half-maddened by the worst drive of the trip and blinded by fogged windows, I swung Callie back around in a reckless turn. A police car materialized from the shadows, as if it had been waiting for someone like us to come along. The adolescent officer admonished me to “stop driving so crazy.” That I did not get a ticket was the sole mercy of the day. We finally reached the hotel, to discover that (a) it had a real live indoor waterslide and (b) the waterslide was now closed for the evening.
Still, we were able to simmer in a hot tub for a spell, and that helped. We went back to the room and drank a couple of nips, and I wrote the day’s blog entry while Jane embarked on a steamship for dreamland. I closed my laptop and glanced at the bed. She was sleeping with her mouth open, her arm curled around a little plush buffalo I’d bought for her. She’d come all the way out here, to drive across trackless plains and support a mission she didn’t believe in, only so that she could be with me. I already missed her. In a couple of days we would arrive in Minneapolis, and Jane would fly home, and I would be alone. The stretch of territory that remained after that, the final leg all the way back to Massachusetts, seemed vast and futile. If I had truly become a Grammar Hippie, an observer instead of a fixer, I no longer had much use for the aims of the League.
I could just speed home. I had a lot more stops on my itinerary in the Midwest and the East than were strictly necessary. I could lay aside my Kit and my hat and dedicate myself to the enticing prospect of getting back to familiar environs as soon as possible. Then all these ambiguities and conundra would be over, and I could return to a normal life.
My cell phone rang.
“Check it,” said Benjamin. “There are two main categories of spelling junctions: plus-junctions and change-junctions. To plus morrow equals tomorrow, that’s a plus junction. Copy times ed equals copied, that’s a change junction. Your very first spelling catch—after the shower curtain, I mean—was