The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [74]
“Surprise!” he roared. After more than three weeks away from the mission, my old friend looked refreshed and geared up to tackle orthographic chicanery once more. “I couldn’t come all the way out to the Midwest without seeing these two crazy kids—I haven’t seen them since the wedding!” The girls, of course, were laughing. I joined in, and my curdled heart squeaked with joy.
The next morning, Lisa suggested a promising neighborhood for typo hunting, and a faithful reader had posted the address of Brennan’s, a combined produce market and local food store. In spite of the temperature hovering at the freezing point, I felt ready to dive in, but I cautioned Benjamin that I might be more of a spotter than a corrector. “I may be seeing it Jane’s way. Maybe I’m more of a descriptivist.”
“No, you’re not, Deck. A Grammar Hippie couldn’t have dreamt up this mission. You may not be a true Hawk, either, but what we need first is momentum. We’ll talk on the way. You tell me what you think, and I’ll—”
“Play devil’s advocate?”
Benjamin shrugged. “No, tell you why you’re wrong.”
I responded with equal sarcasm, channeling Bill Murray: “I love this plan. I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it.”
At Brennan’s, I mentioned the possibility that I’d been lying to myself about the value of these corrections. Plenty of the typos we’d found had gone long unnoticed, and few clouded comprehension. Over at the apple stand, I found a perfect example. No one needed the first n in Washington to recognize the name. I wondered how many people had even heard of Washington Piñata apples, and if they started calling them “Washigton Piñata,” so what?
“A slippery slope, that’s what. You gonna fix this? I want strawberries.”
“I’ll go ask.” I went up to a woman at the center of the store and told her that I’d found a sign missing a letter, offering to fix it since I was going around the country fixing typos. I practically spat it out in one breath as I saw her eyes starting to glaze over.
“Oh no, we’ll take care of it,” she said, though I hadn’t told her what or where the typo was. Then, in a voice reserved for the preadolescent set: “We have a special marker for those signs.” We moved on to the other part of the store, but not before she said—as if to a co-worker, but loud enough so we could hear it—“Oh, whoops, looks like I spelled ‘strawberry’ wrong.” I started to turn back, and she added, “Oh wait. No, I didn’t.” And she glared at me. In that moment, the cashier eerily resembled a few of my exes, making me grateful for Jane’s sweet presence in my life all over again.
“Mm,” Benjamin commented. “Now I’d really like to fix that typo. Anyway.” He proceeded to argue that words used to have multiple spellings, and they’d been understandable, sure, but reading was much easier now. As an example, he offered his father. Due to his dyslexia, the goal of correctly processing what he was reading had trumped learning how to spell, which he’d never quite come back to pick up. “It takes more effort to decipher his e-mails, man. His choices of phonetic representations don’t always make sense to me. If everyone decided spelling conventions don’t matter, we’d get a growing variety of spellings for each word, and when you factor in accents … good luck.” Agreed-upon spellings made the act of reading much quicker for society as a whole. If