The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [75]
We paid for the food and went back into the part of the store with the apples. Benjamin grabbed my green marker and walked up to a guy stocking the shelves from a box across from our “Washigton” apples. “Hey, check this out. There’s an n missing in ‘Washington’. Mind if I write it in real quick?”
The guy shrugged and said, “Sure.”
I caught my jaw on its way down. Benjamin inserted a tiny letter, almost like an apostrophe, thanked the guy, and headed for the exit. “So yeah,” I said, by which I meant, It’s great to have you back.
“I know,” Benjamin said. “The wonders of apathy.” Sometimes it works against you, sometimes with you. That’s the thing about apathy; it doesn’t care. “The ol’ ‘If Mom says no, ask Dad’ trick. Works like a charm. Actually, it never worked on my parents.” Even so, that had been golden delicious.
A cold wind pushed against us as we headed to the car, and the first squadron of snowflakes descended from a dull gray sky. As we headed to State Street, Benjamin and I began a conversation that blurred our surroundings into a similar gray. The stores and scenes and text we passed faded, save for the insistent luminescence of the typos that continued snagging my attention as we swept by. The conversation became the single tangible element of our world, a clamor of argument and counterpoint, with neighborhoods and cities swishing by unnoticed as swords swung and shields clashed.
Benjamin was right that spelling standards had helped. Once that printing press began to crank out words, perhaps a fixing (in terms of freezing in place) of the language was inevitable. Wider access to the written word meant a greater need for standardization. Increasingly better dictionaries offered not only a growing volume of words, with meanings, but also spellings that came to be viewed as authoritative. That’s when some rode the swinging pendulum too far: they tried to fix (in terms of correcting) the language. A true breed of Hawks hatched, and things got messier. An upper-class campaign chose Latin as the gold standard of languages and worked to alter English accordingly. They played havoc with the spellings of words, altering some to be more like their Latin roots, and even Latinizing words from other languages. That’s how we got silent letters in words like doubt and island. The Hawks also added grammatical rules to make English function more like Latin (or seem to); one rule finally dying out is the prohibition against splitting infinitives. Back at the publishing house in D.C., my boss had pulled me aside to note that I’d let a split infinitive “get past” me. I drew him up a quick little poster in which his own cartoon head informed him that “to blithely split” infinitives is perfectly acceptable, allowing us “to fully utilize” our language’s range of expression. We’ve been friends ever since.
“Hold on,” Benjamin interrupted. “You haven’t changed any split infinitives. You wouldn’t. You invented the rules for TEAL in the first place—so you can decide how much of a stickler you want to be. We can discard all of those nonsense dicta that limit expression and don’t truly enhance clarity. What we’re after are obvious errors, helping correct slip-ups, not forcing people to bend to our grammatical will.” Benjamin seemed to think I could walk some mediating line between Hawks and Hippies, but I had trouble seeing it through the thickening snow. “We’re too binary, stuck on ones and zeros, ones and zeros. Forget who you fit with or don’t. Stick to what we’re actually doing.”
Fine. We greeted a woman with her hands in a customer’s hair. “Uh, the sign in your window has a couple letters flipped,” I said, indicating the “ect” in place of etc. “Do you mind if I fix it?”
“Go ahead.”
Well jab me with an apostrophe and call me a contraction. I had not